Koko ok: Motivation

Koko is a 40 year old gorilla with a sign language vocabulary of 2000 words, the intelligence to invent new compound terms from her existing vocabulary (eg "eye hat" for mask) and many qualities that humans can relate to. In an article about his visit to Koko, Alex Hannaford mentions that "Some sceptics have argued that Kok does not understand the meaning behind what she is doing and simply learns to sign because she'll be rewarded. Dr Patterson [President and scientific director of The Gorilla Foundation] admits that in the beginning she, too, thought [this] ... but the gorilla started stringing words together to describe objects that she didn't know the signs for." Hannaford adds that Koko "signed to achieve goals, but these goals weren't treats: They were to get me to follow her around the room, to get me to lie down, to get me to play with her - to interact."

Gorillas, I suspect, have no concept of money, and so it cannot take the place of  the actual needs it in fact helps us to satisfy (at least in part). Koko enables us to see what gorillas are motivated by. In seeing how 'human' she is, we might learn about what really motivates people.

Motivation in an RBE - again

Once we have stopped doing work for its own sake, even if we have automated much of the remaining and truly necessary work, there will be the need for human input. Even Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph accept that there will always be a residual need for human input even in the ultra-automated - 'cybernated' world they imagine when arguing for an RBE.

We seem to have the assumption that people are only motivated by money, but this flies in the face of many facts or apparent facts:

• There are many people working philanthropically who are plainly motivated by doing good rather than by money. Some do good in their professional capacity, some in their own time. If the latter could be freed up from doing whatever they have to do to get paid, to doing what they want to do, there would be step change in doing good.
• People drop out of the rat race - including from highly paid jobs - and not all go off to 'find themseleves' - many take up careers that they believe are more worthwhile.
• Money in itself cannot be an incentive, because it is useless until you buy something with it. Being motivated by making money (over and above what is necessary) is in effect being motivated by having more, or a prior, call on goods and services than other people. Is this really the motivation we want for our society?
• The studies explained by Daniel Pink in his TED talk (which can be seen on internet video sites), and other work.

If we were to have a money-free world, and some problem with motivation were perceived, would we bring back money as an incentive, or would we try to find other motivational means?

Motivation, profit, big pharma

The big pharmaceutical companies are trying to make profits for their shareholders. That's part of the profit system. Have a look at "Big Pharma Big Bucks" on YouTube - US based, with more direct advertising than UK, but you'll get the idea. They can effectively relaunch drugs under a new name, and we all know how generic drugs can often be much cheaper than branded ones. They also 'invent' lifestyle diseases - "disorders" that don't really have any pathology, but play on people's desire to be/feel better, in an effort to sell more drugs. The companies can't really get out of this. If company A starts marketing a new product, company B has to compete.

These companies are selling powerful chemicals, whose unwanted side effects they will want to play down, and the more they sell (ie we take) the higher their profits. Which is supposed to be better. This provoked a thought about motivation. Critics of TVP/TZM claim that without money there would be no motivation. But do you really want pharmaceutical manufacturers / sellers / pharmacists / GPs that are motivated by money if money comes from selling more pills and potions? Plainly we ideally want people motivated by making people better, and it we can't have that we must harness the motivation that money provides to that goal, and not the goal of selling more drugs.

Of course people aren't actually motivated by money - only by the goods and services that they can use it to obtain. Even the power money brings can only be used to obtain goods and services in the end. Because of the monetary system, we have an advertising industry that tries to make people want goods and services, so that they buy them and keep the profits coming in. That's the system - we have to keep that money on the move.

If we step back and look at what we actually want for ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet, a different picture will emerge. What we want from our pharmaceutical industry is good health, for example.

Motivation in an RBE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

Daniel Pink talks about motivation in this 18 video given in Oxford (England). He shows from scientific research that motivation comes from Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose - being able to work under your own authority, building your expertise and working for something bigger than yourself. It is well worth watching. He cites global concerns like Wikipedia and Google in his presentation.

Motivation in an RBE

In the system advocated by the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement, there would be no money. Critics jump on this and say that without money there will be no motivation. The argument comes back that many people are altruistic and do things as volunteers - and amy more people would be able to if they weren't "chained to the desk". Furthermore, inventors and scientists such as Tesla and Einstein acted altruistically. Tesla for one died poor and the progress his inventions would have brought humanity has been set back by the fact that there was no way of monetising some of them so they didn't happen.

Let's think through the motivation of money. Money is worthless in and of itself and is only useful for acquiring the goods and services that people need/want. So money itself does not motivate, only access to goods and services. In a truly abundant society people could have access to whatever they want or need anyway, but we don't know for certain if we can have an abundant society ir not because we are in a system with waste built in. The scarcity we have may not in fact be an attribute of the planet on which we live, but of the very system that purports to deal with the scarcity we think but do not know we have.

So in fact people motivated by money are in fact motivated by getting either more than their fair share of available resources, or simply by getting more than others get. This means that having starving people in the world is what motivates people to earn money for themselves.

OK, some people on seeing the starvation may give to charities that try to deal with it, but why take the food from people's mouths through the monetary system and then give [some of] it back through charity? The motive here might be being better in a moral sense than someone else, but if someone wants to be better than someone else, why can't they directly help people, like Tesla tried. Why the complex monetary system mediating all this?