Academic Spring: it's over nine thousand

Since Monday, a recent article in the Guardian about the Academic Spring movement has helped push the movement's main petition, "The Cost of Knowledge", past the milestone of 9,000 signatures by researchers. Although I've been busy for the past two weeks, preparing two papers for a conference (both of which will become open-access if they pass peer review), I figure it's time to make my stand.

Many of my Google searches lead me to paywalled scholarly papers, and many of these papers -- being mainly in the hard sciences -- aren't in journals my small, mostly liberal-arts oriented, university doesn't subscribe to (and won't provide me, a lowly grad student, with a budget to buy). Paywalls are a time-consuming nuisance, even when my university turns out to have the subscription or (more common) one of the authors -- or sometimes a random prof who obtained it for an undergrad class -- has posted a reprint online.

Even if I had the funding to buy all the paywalled papers I wanted, I would have had to spend dozens of hours filling out expense reports and typing in the university's credit card number. Eventually, the value of my time would probably add up to more money than the publishers were earning.

I'm against artificial impediments to the academic research process, because human prosperity for the rest of the 21st century will depend on the Law of Accelerating Returns. The sooner researchers' productivity reaches the limit of human capacity, the sooner researchers will discover a way to increase that limit, and the sooner the cycle will repeat. Paywalls never help.

Even if a university doesn't accept government funding for publication fees, plenty of taxpayers have paid for it indirectly through their undergraduate tuition. Research scholars like myself pay even more for it indirectly, by working for salaries far smaller than what we could earn in industry. If we're to give up wealth, social status and market visibility for our quasi-monastic devotion to the cause of science, the least society can do for us is to help keep greedy publishing companies out of our way.

#Occupy the #Singularity

[A]s death to the mortal man so failure to the immortal[...]. (Imperial Thought of the Day, Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 4th ed., p. 226)

Some Singularitarians have publicly jumped to the conclusion that younger Occupy Wall Street protesters have nothing to worry about in the long run. The argument runs like this:

Premise: Mind uploading will eliminate the need for food, water, shelter and medicine. The only necessities of posthuman existence will be data storage, processor hardware, and electricity.
Premise: Moore's Law, combined with a new abundant energy source (fusion? space-solar?), will make all three of these resources abundant and the cost of existence negligible.
Conclusion: Therefore, at the time of the Singularity, planet Earth will have transitioned to a post-scarcity economy without poverty.

I consider the first premise all but proven and the second highly probable, but I don't agree that the conclusion logically follows from them.