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Bruce Sterling's Letter from 2035
Bob Kopp writes: "Bruce Sterling has an interesting futurist piece in the current issue of Fortune , titled 'Hard Times: A Letter from 2035.' An excerpt: 'Helpfully, we tend to shoot all our lawyers, unless they are "intellectual-property lawyers," in which case they basically behave like Mafia dons.'"
God I love linking that page. Works best as an IRC topic by itself, they never can resist.
/topic http://www.goatse.cx
Hi. I'm Bruce Sterling. Even though the environment isn't as bad as everyone says it is, I feel like jumping on the doomsday bandwagon in order to sell more books and get my works published. Global warming, overpopulation, species extinction, waah waah waah. Capitalism is bad. Business is bad. Technology (except when it helps out all the animals) is bad. Maybe I should shut up now, and go write some more sci-fi before I sound like even more of an idiot. Sometimes I really wish Sterling would look around before he writes his BS.
Mind if I call you a crackpot. . .
now back to your bunker.
"we now live in the age of cooperation and specialization, not competition" Um...and how did you come up with this concept? No competition? Um...Intel vs AMD?
See subject
doh! you replied as your real self! it's not funny anymore =(
:)
that kind of stuff is appropriate in a comedy site or somesuch, but funny trolls here on slashdot don't need to give us more info than we care about
Anyone who has ever read the Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov or who has done any basic quantum theory understands that ultra complex systems such as the stock market cannot be modelled deterministically. In fact, the mere act of measuring the state of the market is likely to change it.
you do realize that those books are fiction, right?
You people scare me sometimes.
BTW, I enjoyed your gritspoll
Nice form, however you made the fatal mistake of assuming you were funny. Bad move.
I beg to differ. I think we will have super-heated nano-grits.
I'm not sure what this guy is trying to say. We'll have hunger on our planet? That we'll have bad economic times ahead? That the envioronment will be sucky?
Maybe this is news to people who read FORTUNE. But it certainly ain't news to ME.
...until the rest of the world is full... Read, and think: 7-8 billion at 2035 --- but still, I had to read 65 lynx pages to reach an interesting thread. rws
See this monkey, It makes no sense. Why does Chewbaka live on Endor? It makes no sense. . .
World Wars I and II which killed the most number of soldies and civilians in the history of mankind, were brought about primarily because of the "new world" economic policies and capabilities of Europe.
Hmmm, waitaminute -- if the vmlinuz[-\.0-9]+ file is just a symlink to a normal vmlinuz somewhere, wouldn't you just be replacing the file it links to? Or is real kernel in an unexpected place?
Anyhow, I guess I made the mistake of assuming that my copy Red Hat is representative of Linux in general. Bummer, that spoils the joke, at least partially. Unless you want to consider it an anti-Red Hat joke, but that wasn't the intent, and anyway there are probably a lot of lifelong Debianites who've never seen that numeric cruft at all.
[HAMLET] Words, words, words And start using
s for a change
Sorry, cramped formatting
Words, words, words
And start using <BR>s for a change
SAYING you are a bitch does not make your BEING one any more acceptable than SAYING I'm going to shoot you in the head makes actually DOING so acceptable. To wit: nobody cares about your hairsplitting. It's tedious and stupid. You're an idiot. Everyone hates you now. Go away.
Sometimes I think Bruce's optimism just gets in the way of his realism.
There is little real evidence that Europe can get their act together and really make the European Union work; there has yet to be a real test to the unity of the EU, and if history is any indicator it will last until the first nutball dictator is elected and decides to start killing massive numbers of Europeans. Again.
So, what you are left with? The U.N.? Don't make me laugh. An un-elected, non-representative government, most of whom are appointed from non-democratic governments? I don't think so, buddy.
This talk of one-world government is nothing but an exercise in mental masturbation unless that government recognized all of the God given rights that I, as a citizen of the US, have. Otherwise you can count me, and the majority of my fellow USA citizens, out.
You may now proceed with the usual USA bashing (you're just jealous) and baiting (no, I'm not a "militia" member, nor am I a racist).
Just because you don't like the truth doesn't mean it isn't true.
While your site rules, I must ask, how is that funny?
I must also answer: It's not.
Remember: When you find yourself with a "+x: Funny," you're not funny. You're dumb. Do differently.
Unlike you, Mr Sterling's writings is interesting and well crafted.
Campus Crusade (mf, voy, ex)
...In the mirror in front of her, she watched her body
She heard the crack of the blinds mashing against the
window and then felt the cool, wet smoothness of the glass against
her bare ass. Her hips bucked in an urgent rhythm forcing her
cheeks to slide up and down the cool glass. The small room warmed
quickly from their passion causing small beads of condensation to
form on the window. The cool, wet smoothness of the glass against
her ass as she drug it rhythmically across the window only made
the warm, wet smoothness of her lover inside her even warmer. Her
heart raced faster as she wondered if the people in the courtyard
below the tower were watching. She forced herself down onto his
gift of the gods and softly moaned as her body stretched to
accommodate the breadth of its base. She loved feeling the
fullness of his cock inside her and could sense every bump, and
ripple as she slid up and down its entire length. Coming to its
base her swollen bulb of flesh pressed down into his pubic bone
sending waves of firey pleasure through her body. She could feel
the intensity and need building between her legs each time she
pressed down onto him. As she focused on the growing fire of
pleasure, her hips started bucking instinctively dragging her clit
up and down his abdomen. The force of her strokes threw him off
balance. He stumbled around for a second before backing up against
the sink for support; her rhythm never broken. As she drew near
the edge, she pulled herself close to him and let a deep moan
escape her lips.
"Shhh!," he whispered in her ear, "This is a library."
Opening her eyes with a start, she looked in the mirror in
front of her half surprised at the sight before her. There she was
impaled upon this man, her skirt hiked up around her waste, her
legs wrapped around his body. She glanced at the reflection of the
old toilet in the corner, the paint peeling off the grafittied
walls, and suddenly could not believe she was doing this....
She had seen the signs on the kiosks for years--"Campus
crusade, come, join the club"--but never really paid attention
except for wondering how anyone in college could be dumb enough to
add that second comma.
This had all changed a week earlier. She was working in
the library when she walked by a secluded study room. Something
caught her eye through the window of the study room. In a picture
on the wall of the study room, she could see the clear reflection
of her friend from last semesterâ(TM)s English class. She started to
walk in to say hi but quickly stopped as she watched her friend
hike her skirt up. She was not wearing any panties! "What was
going on?" she thought to herself. She watched as her friend slid
her index and middle fingers up her thigh and plunged them into
her sex. She then held them out before her. A man stepped forward
into the reflection to accept her offering. She quickly unzipped
his pants, pulled out his cock, turned away from him, and backed
onto his cock. As she watched her friend grind against this guy,
she knew she should turn away and get back to work, but she just
couldnâ(TM)t seem to move. An intense warmth and wetness was building
in her own pussy as she watched his cock drive into her friend.
Her white ass slammed against the dark, hairy abdomen of her
lover. She reached down to part her lips and the man quickly
reached around and rubbed her clit as she started to come. The
onlooker closed her eyes and imagined that it was her swollen bulb
being rubbed.
Her eyes popped open as the door opened. "Oh, Hi!" her
friend said. She managed a raspy "Hi" in return as she tried to
regain her composure. Her friend introduced the man, and then he
left the women to catch up. They went into the study room and
closed the door so they could talk. The small room smelled
strongly of sex making it even harder for her to concentrate on
talking to her friend.
"Well, arenâ(TM)t you going to ask?" her friend said.
"Ask what?" she replied trying to act ignorant of what she
saw.
"Oh, come on," her friend said, "you were rubbing yourself
when we walked out. You watched us didnâ(TM)t you?"
"Well, yes." she sheepishly replied.
"I donâ(TM)t mind, youâ(TM)re a good friend. There really is a
good explanation though; we wouldnâ(TM)t normally do that here. You
see, weâ(TM)re trying to join this club called Campus Crusade," her
friend said.
"Campus Crusade!? I thought theyâ(TM)d prefer if you didnâ(TM)t do
it anywhere. Arenâ(TM)t they just a bunch of Bible toting
fundamentalist?"
"Oh no, no. Thatâ(TM)s just a front to fool the
administration. Its really a group of adventuresome couples who
have sex all over campus--bathrooms, study rooms, library desks,
elevators, offices, anywhere really.
"Wow!" she enthusiastically said revealing a little more
interest than she intended.
"Weâ(TM)re meeting tomorrow. Youâ(TM)re welcome to come"
She did not get much work done the rest of the day. Even
after sating her desire in the bathroom at lunch, she could not
stop thinking about what she saw or the plans she was dreaming up.
At the meeting the next day she learned the basic rules:
you had to take a Polaroid of the act for proof and posterity; and
you had to have sex in five different places to complete your
first crusade to become a member.
She planned the first stop on her campus crusade for a few
days later. When the day arrived, her excitement was overwhelming.
On her friendâ(TM)s advice, she wore a short, sexy skirt and no
panties. She had scheduled to meet her lover at a restaurant for
lunch with the plan of calling him just before to suggest he meet
her at the library. The thought of her plans and light air on her
uncovered, shaven lips kept a small fire burning between her legs
the entire morning.
When lunch approached, she called him to say she was
running late and was finishing up some work in the library. He
agreed to meet her where she said she was working. She sat at a
desk in the near empty library where he wouldnâ(TM)t see her and began
stroking herself in anticipation and preparation of their meeting.
By the time he arrived, her sex was covered in her wetness and
aching to be filled. She snuck up behind him, pressed her body
against his, kissed the back of his neck, and placed her wet
fingers in front of his nose knowing exactly what this would do to
him. His manhood immediately engorged with blood and strained
against his shorts. Straining in pain and bewildered by her
actions, he ducked into the bathroom to relieve the binds. As he
unzipped his zipper to relieve the pain of his straining cock, the
door opened and she stepped in. She grabbed his throbbing cock
unable to get her hand around its breadth. With her other hand she
lifted her skirt to reveal her aching pussy. Before her lover even
knew what was going on, she jumped into his arms impaling herself
on his cock. She immediately began pumping as fast as she could up
and down his entire length. He stepped toward the window to brace
himself against her thrust....
convulse with pleasure around his as waves of her orgasm shot
through her. Set off by her orgasm, his body tensed up and she
felt his cock surge inside of her.
As she sat on his body, legs around his waist, she smiled
at herself in the mirror. She knew neither of them would ever
forget this. She pulled the Polaroid from her purse and clicked a
picture of them in the mirror.
"Was that a flash?" he asked.
She smiled. "I didnâ(TM)t see anything. You must not me
getting enough blood to your head."
Did you like this story? Cum get thousands more at
Stories
This is pretty good. Someone with some musical tallent should post an mp3 of this.
Enough of this, I'm off to eliminate some waste. (unlike Mr. Sterling I do this in the restroom instead of a magazine article)
Seems to me you do it here...
You now you could always wait a few minutes for the moderators to hit the forum, and some people who have read the article to intelligently reply. In fact if you had read the article and thought about it for a little bit then you most likely would not have had your eyes offended.
I think, if there were awards for cynicism given out, Mr. Sterling would easily take at least second place.
I also tend to agree with the fellow who said that Sterling seems to have consumed more than his share of lead paint flakes. I feel sorry for the fellow if he truly believes that he can (a), predict the future at all, even in satire, and (b), really believe that the whole world is going to turn out as he describes.
The future is exactly what we want to make of it. Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, we're CREATING the future in God only knows how many different forms and ways.
There's no way to predict how things will turn out as a whole, but I will say that what goes around invariably comes around. Those who put out greed, hate, and other dark aspects will get them back upon themselves as a group, and will eventually self-destruct (unfortunately causing much collateral damage to the rest of us along the way).
Those who strive to be just a tiny bit better of a person every day, who are not afraid to "push the envelope" as it were, will be the ones who really can make a positive difference.
The statement that one person cannot change the world may or may not be accurate (it depends on how one defines 'change' in that context), but look at what's happening already with open-source. Linux, and the other open-source Uni*es, have succeeded because a whole bunch of people got together and decided "We don't want Microsoft to be the only option."
While a new OS may not necessarily be what saves the planet, the driving force that created said OS just might if applied in different directions.
So. Are you going to snap at someone today, or acknowledge a polite "good morning" ?
Think about it.
I think Bruce is wrong about the body count. The new economy is going to have an amazingly high body count. In a world of cheap, free, or open source everything, some entire industries will be put of business. There will be lots of upset people and there will be some BIG conflicts, disputes that will make the current MPAA v 2600 shit look like a minor pissing contest. Sooner or later some people who find themselves displaced in the new economy are going to bring out the big guns. I hope I can find someplace nice to retire before the shooting starts.
er, In case you are confused, I think the original anonymous coward meant your signature, e.g. "I am.. therfore I think.". Not your coke/pepsi war thing.
i like that too, but that isn't my page. it is just a fan of mine, tee-hee. hooray. thank you.
And your point is?
Are you JonKatz?
God I love linking that page.
Have you ever spent some time thinking about why that might be? well, I'll tell you. It's beacuse you're an immature moron.
Now that was some funny stuff =)
However, your post kind of infers that he did lots of research, then wrote the Foundation Trilogy based on it. In fact, the 'Foundation Trilogy' is a collection of serialized short stories he wrote for pulp magazines in the '40's. If you think about the books, there are some odd gaps in places; this is why. Also, he came up with the basic framework for the storyline and the main plot of the first story while walking to his editor's office one day. He had promised a story by that date, and didn't have anything. He actually walked instead of taking a cab to give himself more time to come up with something.
He talked about all this in an essay he wrote about the Foundation books; it may even have been in one of the later ones.
Remember, the only reason why "unprotected" sex is bad compared to "protected" sex are the unintended consequences of pregnancy or venereal disease. I hope people aren't starting to treat protected sex as something virtuous on some kind of mystical level. The whole thing is just a little disturbing... especially from Bruce Sterling.
On the other hand, I may have entirely misread him... but it was an odd statement.
Problem is, 75% of linux companies will be bankrupt in 5 years. Actually, more like 100%.
Don't worry Taco, your Perl skills will come in handy when you're begging for quarters on the corner of Main & East Street!
funny shit.
This kind of thing is like monstrous speaking fees -- it's a perk of fame. If you've got it, might as well cash in when you can. The schmucks at Fortune won't know the difference, and they deserve it anyway.
If you want paradigm-smashing insight into technology, society, and the future, why are you reading Fortune anyway?
Uh, pal, 35 years isn't long. You do know this is 2000, not 1500, right? We're not talking 535 years from now - but 35. Now, in our current state, 35 years loses much more meaning and difference than it had between 1965 and 2000 (which was mainly in computers...)
The changes we see in computing wil be extremely large and such, etc etc, but you will not see Star Trek computers or Data yet. I'm sorry. In fact, you probably never will. Robotic intelligence is a myth. AI, however, exists - but it's artificial, as its name says. It's not real. It's calculated, etc. There's no... soul.
We can get a robot to pick up and hold a cup. Kinda. Sorta. Barely. Kinda. We could do that 20 years ago, too. Somehow, I think humans will be running things in 2035.
Actually this is being done in southern Spain, where there is very little rainfall. Land is cheap, so farmers take big sheets of clear plastic and make tents over big areas to keep the humidity in, and grow crops that way. Apparently it's quite economical.
yea, I'll admit its slightly amusing. I just felt like being an arrogant, pedantic bitch at that particular moment :]
It does, however, help to state your premise in complete sentances. At least Sterling has bothered to do that.
It's 2038, and a 64-bit clock will do.
great stuff.
how much money do you lawyers make?
that means you're what, 50?
Go away, old man. Slashdot is only for immature linux zelots.
"but the fact is, most of the farming areas of the U.S. are now being chewed up by enormous corporations who care much more about profit and yield today, than any long term land management." I find it quite ironic you call this a fact. Out of curiousity, how's this happening in the several large farming states (North Dakota + a few others) where large corporations are *prohibited* from buying farmland.
The strangest thing about AIDS is that despite being of African origin, people of European heritage are most resistant to it. (It uses an infection mechanism similar to smallpox or polio, this is what Europeans are resistant to.) We're seeing almost a replay of the smallpox epidemic which wiped out 80% of the native american population in the 15th century. This epidemic is what shaped the balance of political power in the Americas. The prospect of such a radical shift in territorial/political domination due to AIDS is a rather frightening possibility...
If you actually read his material and understood the significance of his claim you wouldn't say that. Just to let you know, the matrix was a blatant rip of his ideas.
lets say amabook.com goes chapter 11, what assets do they have to sell off? Book racks? Surely they don't own any servers, probably lease them.
now lets say ibmish goes chaper 11, it would be a wonderland of assets!
just something else to worry about
No offense but your quote is idiotic. Perhaps you ought to read Descarte instead of just transposing one of his misused conclusions.
take a computation theory class ... such problems are undecidable at best ... it is not even in the ball park as p=np ... this up there with the halting problem ... there is something called finite injury ... which states at best you can get/approximate a finite amount of information out of these class of problems ... morons ... people forget there is a science behind computer science
/me thwacks the anonymous descarte-quoting coward
:( )
(I thought it was funny vassago
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
Well, for starters, this guy is obviously speaking in such vague generalities that we can neither prove nor disprove his vision of the future. That's like what soothsayers, fortune tellers, psychics, etc. do. They make vague predictions that can be interpreted so widely that they always seem to be right. Yeah, there will be bear markets in the future. There will also be bull markets. There will be depressions, recessions, prosperity, and maybe even some more irrational exuberance for good measure. That's the way of market cycles. Will we ever gain complete control of the market? I doubt it, but we probably will come to understand more than we do now. Just remember, for one question we answer, multiple new questions will be posed which seem even more impossible to fathom. Never trust anyone who claims they can see the future and have all the answers. I prefer to function as intelligently as I can in the present as well as the future, and I at least know enough to state that I don't know it all. IMHO, this guy is a fraud.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
Bruce is agaist pesticides, irradiation, GMO, large scale farming, etc, and all the other technologies which increase efficiency and *REDUCE* land use. Since 1920, the US has consistently returned farmland back to forest, some 80 million acres have been reforested. Why? Because modern technology reduces food waste, from the farmland to your dinner table. Even refrigerators save forests because of the net energy saved.
The greens want to repeal all this and go back to third-world style farming, farming as it was in the colonial days. In other words, organic farming. Organic farming, if used to feed the whole world, would require a massive expansion of farmland, which means, slashing and burning forests and wild praires to make them into organic farms. No need to wonder if this will happen, we can just look at the Third World or our own history to see organic farming in practice, and what it does to the environment.
(Did I mention excessive tilling and topsoil loss?)
Elimination of antibiotics and growth hormones alone mean cattle must eat more feedstock and have more acreage planted for them to graze. Meat is massively inefficient. In fact, "green technology" should be promoting a massive investment in genetically engineered meat.
I mean, why do we grow a whole cow rather than just taking some muscle and bone cells in a culture, and growing beef like we grow skin cells for human burn victims? In fact, it would be more humane to just grow the meat directly, rather than an animal, which you must "kill" to eat it, and confine it for its whole life.
Biotechnology represents the chance to apply Moore's law to food. Modern farms are like silicon fabs, and have led to a 300% growth in efficiency in this century.
This efficiency gain alone, has meant that large tracts of farmland are no longer needed, and can be returned to the wild.
While fuzzy headed cranks like Bruce "Viridian" Sterling babble on against biotech and pesticides, and promote organic and PV technology, and complain about urban sprawl, the fact of the matter is, the largest damage done to the environment has been the destruction of forests for farming. Only in this century have we reversed this trend by increasing our farming efficiency.
Hopefully, someone will stop the insanity before organic farming causes a massive destruction of wilderness, increased starvation and topsoil loss, and returns us to the misery that was the 19th century.
The point is even stronger when you consider Bruce's obsession with carbon. He fixates on fossil fuels, but totally ignores the contribution caused by deforestation.
Of course, there is no point even trying to argue this. Rational debate has been replaced by scare tactics. Apparently, all man-made chemicals are evil and suspected of cancer. Radiation is evil. Anything man modified is evil (while nature is inherently benign, right?) The only permissible level of DDT or Dioxin is 0.000000 parts per quadrillion. And let's not forget plutonium, the most "poisonous" subtance in existance.
If I had to write a scary letter from the year 2035, it would be a world where the greenpeace wackos prevailed.
The only time one of my Linux machines had those viral numbers appended onto the vmlinuz filename, it turned out that the machine had been infected with the RedHat virus. I, of course, got rid of it by installing the Slackware anti-virus program.
The virus writers at Red Hat, in their infinite wisdom, create a symbolic link to their virus-infected vmlinuz-x.xx.xxx-vx.x file named plain vmlinuz. In the old days (don't know if it's still the case, hope to never have to find out again) they then hardcoded the vmlinuz file with all the number croft into lilo.conf. End result- you could recompile the kernel as much as you liked, when you typed 'lilo' to enable it, the same old crappy binary kernel that RedHat installed would be booted.
It's the kind of sickness we have come to expect from the pimpmongers at RHAT.
I have to disagree with two points. First, you state:
> among other things, the Green Revolution in
> agriculture and the plummeting price of food
> means that the Great Plains aren't getting
> chewed up by clueless undereducated farmers
> as they were in the 1930s
Well, that's a loaded statement; I'll ignore the elitism, but the fact is, most of the farming areas of the U.S. are now being chewed up by enormous corporations who care much more about profit and yield today, than any long term land management. The possible ramifications of the lack of species diversification in food crops (if sub-type X produces more than sub-type Y, screw sub-type Y, even though it may prove to be resistant to a as yet unknown disease) could make the Great Dust Bowl look like the bald patch on your lawn. Let's not forget poorly thought out, supposed "Green" policies, like the introduction of Cane Toads into Australia.
Second, you state:
> People like Sterling probably didn't see any
> point in financing Columbus' expedition, either.
This is a fictional essay, Sterling is not saying that he doesn't believe space exploration was worthless, he just believes (backed up by most of the research I've seen) that space exploration will lack _monetary_ profit in the near future.
Another thing. All these environmental problems and the market is flat? Please... If anything the grains markets and the softs markets (cocoa, sugar, etc) should be volitile enough to make some money. Consider this, constant to slightly depressed demand, with a varying supply worldwide. Of course environmentally based markets would vary... And if you take the Algae which put off hydrogen story from a few days back, couple it with continuing advancement in fuel-cell development and carbo loaded Sugar Cane plantations could become tomorrow's version of today's OPEC Oil producers further enhancing demand for sugar. Interesting piece overall...
However, he seems not to be able to imagine anything like a future that works, or even works imperfectly, enmired as he is in the culture of despair that has gripped progressive intellectuals from about 1970 onward. Up till then, progressivism could point to a more-or-less standard set of benchmarks, say, X acres of swampland drained to produce X acres of land to house X new factories employing X number of people, all due to the wise central planning of a board of men working in the public interest. The hippie left, on the other hand, never could decide whether its ultimate Paradise was a city or a garden, a jungle or a void. (Not every hippie was keen on going up the country to work on Maggie's farm, or any farm, for that matter. For many, the Future was about lazily writing poetry while robots took care of the housework.) Their adoption of "the environment" as a cause (which heretofore, had been the province of dotty old ladies, deer hunters, and Barry Goldwater) meant that the situation was always lose-lose: no matter how well things were going, it would always have to be measured against an ideal state in which human beings were entirely absent. Finding out that Communism wasn't not merely sometimes, but most of the time harmful to developing (and even developed) countries, that even socialism wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, and that even current Soviet states were crumbling worsened the situation: while America, capitalism, and wearing suits and wing-tips were all still anathema, there seemed fewer and fewer alternatives. Nowadays, if you hear any progressive intellectual describe a desirable social order, it's usually with a fantasy element: a total abandonment of technology, communities of magic-using pantheists, descriptions of hypothetically "unspoiled" hunter-gatherer communities, Latino communites stripped of political unrest, machismo, or any but the most benign forms of Catholicism. Or else...nothing.
Mr. Sterling is a firm believer in nothing. If we'd been a little more careful, his authorial voice warns, we wouldn't have this mess. What we'd have otherwise doesn't seem to interest him:having more than seven billion people in the world is awful, but he also cites the lack of children around as a tragedy. Innovation is ultimately boring, but so is its lack: his all-business, all the time society isn't any less or more uninspiring than the progressive vision of turning all human endeavor into a form of politics. As for the environmental prognostications, it's almost a truism nowadays that eco-apocalypse is just as often predicted and often averted as the other kind. We didn't see it coming? And just what have we been hearing about all these years?
From what I've been able to figure out, Mr. Sterling was given an assignment to write about "the future of business", couldn't see one, and ended up trotting out the same old songs and dances. Sad.
teleny, friend of cats.
Are you sure you don't mean "Jane, his wife" rather than "daughter Judy"?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No, I think they will have cooled off by then.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Everyday I find a new reason to get news elsewhere. Moderate it down. It is meaningless crap. /. has certainly gone down the tubes.
Intelligent conversation on
That's "speech", as in "a WHOLE Goddamn SPEECH", numbskull.
Who gives a fuck what you say you're being, when you actually are being something else? Then why the fuck whould we take your claims as to what you "are being" seriously?The "context" here is, in fact, neither that you are being "picky" nor that you are being more or less "serious" about what you say, but that you are being just plain WRONG.
So do us all -- including your parents, probably -- a favour drop dead, fuckwit.
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
Bruce writes like humans are running things in 2035... comedy Sterling style :)
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Au contraire, that's exactly what the market is for. The "someone wins, someone loses" mentality about the market is common among lay folks (like myself, I Am Not An Economist), especially those of a scientific bent, as it plays to a certain hypothetical Principle of Conservation of Wealth.
But economics simply doesn't work that way. If that were the case, then taking that concept ad absurdam, we'd all still be having to share the same meager wealth that the first few thousand proto-humans had a few million years ago, among the six billion of us.
Markets, per se, don't create wealth. Work does. At the end of the day today, the United States is richer by the results of about 800 million hours of people's labor. Some of that labor is directly producing goods, some of it is producing abstract goods, some of it is providing services.
oops. forgot to close the tag
I am a moron.
Seems to me you do it here... /. is?
What do you think
--Shoeboy
Take a look at what the Israelis are doing in the Negev; there are farms in the middle of a desert.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I think he's referring to labor unrest, more than anything else. Early attempts at unions (unions were a direct result of industrialization) were often met with violence on both the part of the workers and the factory owners. The factory owners often had government help in cracking skulls.
Getting mangled by the rather unsafe machines used at the dawn of the industrial revolution or things like the Triangle Factory Fire in New York (many women burned to death in a shirt factory in NYC because the doors were barred to prevent people from leaving before their shifts ended.) also produced some rather high body counts.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
> you do realize that those books are fiction, right?
True, but the person who wrote them was an economist. (As well as a chemist. As well as a linguist. As well as... he knows lots of subjects.) But the point is, Asimov knows what he's talking about when he discusses such things. He did a good deal (ie: several years' worth) of research before he wrote the first Foundation trilogy.
At any rate, from what the short blurb at the bottom of the Fortune story said, I'd say Asimov has better credentials to has name than this Bruce Sterling guy.
(Of course, if anyone knows better... ie: if, in fact, Bruce Sterling is a noted economist or something, feel free to point the fact out!)
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Ok, my bad, then. I know he did a lot of research before writing one of his major works; I thought it was Foundation. However, if you know better, then I'll accept that.
I still stand by my assertion that he knows more about economics than Bruce Sterling apparently does, however.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Is 2000 that similar to 1960?
Microwave ovens existed, barely. Cable TV? VCRS/CDs? Let alone the internet and computers?
That's just in terms of products that weren't available then. Then add things like: you can give people artificial hearts? What is this AIDS thing, anyway? What do you mean gasoline is $1.80 a gallon?
The trick is --- it doesn't _feel_ that different, to anyone who lived through it. But in reality, we're a completely different society; and, in the same way, the world of 2040 won't feel that different from today, for those of us who live through it --- but, taken as snapshots, and then compared, they would be completely different.
Hmmm... is religion something that people "retreat" into?
I can see how that could easily be read as a slam on religion --- which isn't what I intended. But i've seen a lot of people who are vaguely associated with some religion discover that, by becoming more religious, they have an anchor they found missing in the world as a whole; so I think, for some segments of society, religion will be the answer to the fatigue.
Not for everyone --- and people that are anti-religious would probably get pushed the other way, as you described --- but, for many. *shrug*
You don't. The whole point of my comment was that even though he appeared to be contradicting himself, he wasn't. I meant bitch in the context that I was not real serious about what I was saying. I agree with him that Hamlet will always be better the way ol Willy wrote it, but it at least appeared that he was contradicting himself.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Relax.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Philip K. Dicks oft visited theme of Perky Pat and her world... sounds a lot like The Sims.
Not what I'd expect from Sterling. Still, the idea of shooting lawyers on sight sounds kind of neat :-)
ObFilthyAmerikaners: The writer really needs to look up "communis[mt]" in the dictionary.
Wow, the whole time from when I saw this story on slashdot, until the time I actually loaded the link, I thought it was talking about Bruce Perns. I really read slashdot to much, I think....
[ c h a d   o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, that's a loaded statement; I'll ignore the elitism, but the fact is, most of the farming areas of the U.S. are now being chewed up by enormous corporations who care much more about profit and yield today, than any long term land management.
That's such bullshit. One of the side effects of living in Iowa is that I know what's actually happening in the Ag industry, and what you described isn't it. Farms, for the most part, are still owned by individual farmers, and the system is optimized to serve there needs. And also, these farmers plan to be working their land for the rest of their lives. They take conservation very seriously.
[ c h a d   o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
History isn't over, neither is economics. In 1900, many intellectuals forsaw a future of peace and leisure, where everyone would be rich. It didn't happen for them, and it won't happen for us.
But don't you see, it has happend for us. At least in the US, someone would be considered 'poor' by our standards would be considered rich or at least middle class by their standards.
[ c h a d   o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
First of all, no war need be fought for a global government to happen.
Second of all, the current governments will not disappear under the one world government.
So to figure out what will make a world government happen we must first outline what a government is.
Economy--Every government is messing with their economy, even if they claim that they are not.
Control of an economy is very critical to being a government. If a country's economy fails the people leave and the government looses funding. There have also been many people who theorize that future war will rarely be fought with bombs, but with threats to close up shop and move all our business out (you can see some of this happening now). What is an army other then something to go in a kill people and destroy infrastructure. Would you not rather those people come to your country and make money that you can tax to run your government with?
Ok, so now that I put down that control of the economy is the foremost thing that defines a government let me explain how a one world government can happen without a war. Globalization. As companies spread out over the world they will demand that the local terrifies and other import/export regulations be dropped, eventually the governments will have to agree. Also, these companies are going to get into trouble sometimes so international courts will be setup to solve these problems....
See where I am going with this? A one world government will not happen some day when China, USA, or other major power starts marching across the globe quashing the local governments in its path. Instead the present governments will be gradually giving up power to international bodies (because their citizens demand it). Take a look at the European Union, see the future there.
And there will eventually come a day when people start realizing one by one that we have a one world government where the present governments are really more like provinces or states.
END
On the subject of computers predicting stock movement I would like to add following:
1. Stock market is actually a "computing machine" which with its milions of nodes (investors) evaluate how much certain corporation(s) or bond/debt is worth at present time. In order for computer to do this it would have to became omnipresent in an Orwellian way. It still could not anticipate where the stock will go in the future, because that is determined by future events or even no events (future without any event).
2. On the node level (sole investor being replaced by computer) problem is Artificial stupidity which is very hard to produce in a machine. You need to put
something like FUD parameters in a computer fuzzy logic in order to create something similar to average investor. Perfect machine (or in this case perfect replacement for an investor) must under certain conditions buy high and sell low.
If you look at the Euro and the European Economic Union, they have taken steps to prevent this. First of all, there are restrictions on inflation and interest rates, etc. Each member nation had to stay in-band for a period of time prior to Euro roll-out, and so forth. It would not be impossible to do. But there are some really nice things about multiple currencies. One of them is the capability to use another currency to force your economy back to health - several central and south American nations have done this in recent years - pegged the (fill in the blank) to the USD and allowed the relative stability of the US economy and interest rates to keep their own inflation, interest rates under control. It is a lot easier, from a governmental and central bank point of view, to say that federal law requires whatever painful action that is about to be implemented than it is to say that the painful fix is not required but it is good in the long run. Essentially, a variety of currency allows fine control over national economies, whereas a global currency would have some serious benefits that turn into serious flaws during depressions/recessions. So the globo is a bad idea, yeah. But good, too. The whole article was pretty depressing, though. I don't want to live to 110. Thats like, old. And the extra years are old, frail years. That sucks, dude.
itachi
Well, here in the US, we do happen to have a right wing fringe that is fond of the idea of throwing the UN out like a cheating lover. Or something like that. Then there are those on the lookout for UN occupation troops, and watching the skies for black helicopters. All in the name of keeping the US federal govt. seperate and distinct from the UN. So yes, you could say that there is not a universal acceptance of the UN.
As for the notion of a global currency, you're so right about not needing a central government to carry out such a plan. A single central bank would make it way more feasible, and it would also introduce all sorts of problems. First of all, a central bank is just as likely to be unpopular on the radical fringe of politcal thought (left and right). Second, a global central bank would prevent nations from carrying out their own monetary policy. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it can have bad side effects - what's sauce for the goose turns out not to be sauce for the economy of Algeria. Or something like that.
itachi
Rene descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am.
me
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
Rodentia said:
the attitude is all now. That jaded, po-mo chatter is sooo yesterday. In two years this
article will look as dated as a 1-gig Athlon.
Another poster commented that the 1990s don't look very much like SF writers in the 1960s said they
would, either. Bang on. Sterling's whine about the deteriorating ecosystem totally ignores the
progress being made...among other things, the Green Revolution in agriculture and the plummeting
price of food means that the Great Plains aren't getting chewed up by clueless undereducated
farmers as they were in the 1930s. Cheap water filtration is getting us to the point
where you have to look really hard to find polluted water systems
in North America and Europe...and the rest of the world is catching up.
Sterling's notion of the world turning its back on space is a non-starter also...one of these days
soon we'll be up there, because it's raining soup and NASA isn't the only outfit that can afford bowls any more.
People like Sterling probably didn't see any point in financing Columbus' expedition, either.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If growth continues at its current rate, and if we added 1 billion people in the last 12 years (so we went from 5 to 6 billion) then in the coming 12 years we'll grow to 6 * (6/5) = 7.2 billion, and in 2035 we'll be with 10.2 billion.
However, 35 years is a long time. In the last 35 years the growth rate in the western world declined considerably. Same might happen in the coming 35 years for other parts of the world.
1. Plan 9 is dead. Maybe you're thinking of Hurd.
2. Hopefully nobody will be doing date-ciritical things on a 32-bit UNIX box in 30 years. How many 16-bit PDPs are in service doing useful things today?
... But we've all been through this before.
Hands in my pocket
The original quote went something like "I am... I think, therefore I am. I think."
In this context, we see that Descartes was a rambling drunk.
Hands in my pocket
I think greed is more like compulsive gambling. A desire that goes on, without end.
Yes, it is. People have the strange idea that rich people (not wealthy people, that's a different story) are happier. They're not, basically.
It is possible that greed is a major motivator for many people, especially in terms of allocating resources (which is what economics is). But just because you have more, it doesn't necessarily follow that you'll be any happier than you are now.
Nowadays, a lot of millionaires feel dissatisfied, as they know there are all those billionaires and centimillionaires who have more than they do. In earlier times, they would be happier, because they would think they were on top of it all.
Will in Seattle
Optimist that I am, I find it incredibly naive to believe we'll have workable full-scale nanotech by 2035. Not because we can't do it. But because we won't.
Basically, it's economics. As Bruce's story depicts, in his future they don't go to Mars because it's a bad investment. Which it is, on anything other than a very very long term timeframe. The same goes for nanotech - if people don't care enough to invest in it, it just won't happen. If basic science finds it more rewarding to work on something else, nanotech probably won't occur in anything other than some very basic forms.
It just costs way too much.
Will in Seattle
And reading his writing is a much richer multi-media experience if you've heard him giving readings enough to know his voice, with that California valley accent, so out of place in Texas, fondling every word like stream water rolling over pebbles. Oooooh...
I prefer Bill Gibson's myself. Although Stan (of Mars fame) has a pretty cool reading voice, based on my memories of him at Boreal 87.
Will in Seattle
Human nature is just that way, when something goes wrong we want the ability to blame someone, anyone, other then ourselves and the legal system with the lawyers allows that to happen.
But, you're looking at this from the perspective of Fin 20th Century America, where we have 70 lawyers more per capita than any other nation. This is just a fad. Conflict resolution and economic agreements can become computerized, possibly with Legal AIs or some other solution. Why have one lawyer handle four contracts, when you can have one lawyer handle four thousand contracts, for example?
Deserts - actually, this is kind of predicatable, and we've been predicting it for almost a hundred years now. And that applies to Antartica and other deserts as well.
Space - but why do people have to do ore mining from asteroids? It's cheaper to use self-repairing robot factories to do this, which mine the asteroids in place, package it up, pop an engine on (using H20 asteroids for fuel), and put it back into earth orbit, where the space elevator can bring it to the surface.
Will in Seattle
they used Linux for their vending robots. Coke used Win2K-R2D2, which while portable and scalable, still had enough bugs in the code that the bottles blew up inside the vending robots before they could be launched.
In the words of the Great Robot Philosopher:
Pop, Pop!
Fizz, Fizz!
Oh, What a Relief It Is!
Will in Seattle
I think you mean the Patent Wars, or the War to End All Intellectual Domain Disputes.
That was the one where they tried Emperor Bill Gates for crimes against technology.
Will in Seattle
That jaded, po-mo chatter is sooo yesterday. In two years this article will look as dated as a 1-gig Athlon.
Yeah. Human societies seem to go from a cynical phase, especially at ends of centuries, to a bright and bubbly exuberance. And it's about bleedin' time!
Will in Seattle
All in all, the society presented seems, as author contends, very dull.
Well, of course. They're in a recession/depression, burned out on change, and most people are much poorer than they were for many years. Think back to other periods in a long recession in this country, that were preceded by long periods of prosperity, and you'd be pretty battered down as well.
Will in Seattle
I don't like it. Don't think it's probable. Too much extrapolation from present conditions. The future is nonlinear, arbitrary jumps. Can't predict it.
2035 will probably be another top of a much less enthusiastic bull market. The depression will bottom around 2010-20. It will be a profound depression. The social fabric of this country will come apart in the most profound manner.
If you have to get me to give a vision of the future, I think the world of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash will be closest to it.
Right. Without work, there isn't any market. By the same token, without employees there is no corporation, without taxpayers there is no government. But the people that analyze the market also go and report things to the people that run it, so whenever a pattern emerges, everyone immediately rushes to change everything to take advantage of it. Usually the pattern goes away, and everyone is back where they started. Or, perhaps, even worse off.
Big IPOs for small companies with unproven business plans frighten me almost as much as the megacorps do.
The biggest thing in these cards was of course, airtravel and travel in general. I think the people who made them saw the way travel was going to change the world, though they didn't get the details right. The had no ideas about the information age, but after all that would be easily eclipsed by the huge travel revolutions that was occuring in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The biggest problem of today, and a problem that gets dressed up in many different ways is the concept of greed. People have a tendency to think that greedy people are the ones who have the most chance of changing things in the world, and that non-greedy people are ultimately not going to matter. This kind of social pressure reminds me of a story I heard that comes from England during The Great War (WWI). Ok, the story involved a young communist who was a conscientious objector to the war. (Incidentally, I am not promoting communism here, but I believe in giving people all the facts in a given situation. I personally think that the communist systems that have existed in the world have often been run by people motivated by greed.) To him, the war was being fought for the upper class that were his real enemies (in all the participating countries) and the soldiers who went off to fight the war were fools. However, throughout the country, able bodied men who refused to go off to fight the war were branded as cowards. No one was willing to look very deeply at their philosophical objections to the war. This fellow finally went off to fight in the war after a pretty young girl dropped a white feather in his lap (i.e. saying in a silent way, "You are healthy and you are here in England and not at the front, therefore, you are a coward.")
That's the real trouble with our modern greed based culture, TV shows like "Who wants to marry a multi-millionaire?" and the like show that money and material success are the true measure of a person. Most people would chuckle at a person who had a chance to sell out and make millions who chose instead to help society, at least that's the impression I get from the media. The first thing they'll do is castigate the person for naiveté, the next after that is impugn the person's motives, "No one is that altruistic, it must be a scam."
The big question though, is are greedy people happy? I would say that people who are greedy will be on the whole less happy than people who are not. They'll be more driven, perhaps, more ambitious, but not happy. This has nothing to do with rich or poor, either, I'm talking about people who think of greed as a cardinal virtue, whatever their tax bracket.
One thing any individual can do is to drop the "Greed is good" mentality from their own mind. There are better motivations to get you to success, such as idealism. Greed is just an artificial lust, it is an unfulfilled desire. Unfulfilled desires lead to suffering until they are rejected (ahem, this is not my own idea, of course, it comes from Buddhism) or fullfilled. I wonder when you look at some of these incredibly rich people driving things like the battle over deCSS who always want more, more, more if greed is even a fulfillable desire?
I think greed is more like compulsive gambling. A desire that goes on, without end.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Private property's a simple enough concept. And while your concept of a river being owned by a county or state, do you not realize that many rivers cross national boundaries? Or the fact that one river flows into another, and then into an ocean or large sea? Each continent only has a few river systems. I bet you could even name one of the major ones. Plus, you never explained how someone can own an environment. Let's say that your company has a mine near a large river. Let's then assume that since propery methods & safegards are expensive, you accidently lose a whole bunch of mecury in the river, and it flows downstream and obliterates a whole ecosystem. And, just for fun, lets say the damage is mostly done in another country. Now, who owns the river you dumped in, who owns the river that the now dead river flows into, and who owns the oceans that the final river flows into, who owns the atmospheric weather that gets formed over that ocean, and who owns the land, rivers, and lakes that the rain eventually falls on?
Intolerant people should be shot.
I didn't ask if it _has_ a price, I asked what it was. And I asked about more than just the price of your loved ones too...
Intolerant people should be shot.
Oh, and about the airlines and cars thing... There's a difference between a risk that I choose to take for myself, my children, and other loved ones and risks taken by someone else that affect me & mine.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Oh I don't know. Really, what would be the difference between a desert city, with Martian domes and your current metropolis. You'd have city as far as your eyes could see. Parks, and movies. How often does the average city dweller get out of the city? And usually they get there on a plane to some island out in the ocean.
I don't think it's as far out as you seem to think. Make it marginally attractive - tax breaks, lower inital prop values, pre-wired for net from the ground up... Frankly I'd prefer to see more of us move to a structure like this, and let some of our currently decimated areas of the earth go back wild so I could enjoy them on my vacation :)...
-- Minupla
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
DOH!! (thanks :)
How was it clear that Netscape would die from the beginning?
I don't know the story, can soeone please explain here.
Brave New World did happen.
The only difference is the naming.
Soma= prozac, ritalin, and all the illegal drugs
Alphas, betas, etc are replaced by social classes that are supposedly "temporary" because they're monetary.
And people are told to hold themselves back by virtues of a label. lookat ADD, ADHD, SAD, ARPD, any extreme or unusual personality characteristic is viewed as a mental disorder.
Part of the reason why so much of science fiction has trouble getting the future right is that they tend to take the present day's trends/memes and extrapolate them too much into the future. Take his assessment that by 2035 humanity still hasn't gotten to Mars yet: IMOHO, this reflects too much of today's navel-gazing, who-cares-about-it-if-I-can't-make-a-buck-off-it-r ight-away self-absorption. Future generations may have different priorities, and in any case the United States isn't the only country on earth with a space program. All it would take is one wild-eyed visionary in the right place at the right time, and the Great Migration will begin.
Occasionally, I think he's way to verbose
---
You were a moderator with 5 points. You should have read the moderator guidelines before you did any moderating
> stop harping on about the hells of the near future
If you don't want to hear it, don't read it.
> would kill to read a positive, yet realistic, prediction
You assume that positive & realistic is possible. Maybe you don't want to hear it.
Actually, IMHO there is lots of exciting cool stuph mentioned in the article, as well as improved quality of life. It's just not the focus of what he is trying to say.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Oh we could find an AIDS cure (I assume you mean cure - we already have "treatments," and will continue to find them, subtle as they may be) in a heartbeat. But that's not where the money is.
Why would we want to find a cure for AIDS? That'd be the dumbest thing an intelligent American could do. There's no need to find a cure when you can just keep coming out with treatments and charging 90 zillion bucks for it, and keep getting rich. This way, the customer keeps coming back and you get more money!
Same thing with the "we can't even find a cure for the common cold! hu hu!" deal. Do you realize how much money those cold "treatment" medicines generate? Do you realize how much less they'd generate if they were one-time things? Not a good idea, and they know it.
Mr sterling eat one more lead laden paint chip than he should have. This guy could generate one of the biggest grandaddy flames of my entire net life in that little piece but I will try to restrain myself.
The concept that the stock market can be adequately mapped and predicted for starters is not even removely close to being accurate. For many, many, many, years our most brilliant mathmeticians and physicists have attempted to use chaos theory int predicting the stock market and while there is some rudimentary ability to predict what it will do it is an open system not a closed one. This is not something that could be done even if technology could advance to the level on Star Trek. As an investment community grows the community changes and is prevented from doing the kinds of things he mentions.
Secondly on all of his so called social knowledge and government I would also have to agree. If anything we have seen policies that have increased the ability of one to be liberal we have seen in just say 40 years: fair and equal traetment of minorities (at least better than what it was before), sexual orientation (some problems but generally ok), focusing the moral compass (we at least see the people who are getting murdered instead of them getting glossed over). Another assumption is that this individual is a "regular joe" that sounds foolish considering that the whole concept of being able to do an analysis of your own cuture and doing logical considerations about all related life isn't something that can easily be attained (I really can't accurately do it and I doubt that anyone else can either not even nobel prize winners). Another concept which is wrong is that people will gradually turn into the type that you would find in Fahrenheight(sp) 451 is also absurd. Even the development of the evil
television hasn't really killed anyone just allowed for more choices. I think that we have seen a remarkable increase in the ability to gain knowledge and facts and to generally educate one another. The concept of a one world government by 2035 isn't even reasonable at all. Think of it if I am rather bad off or I have different opinions than you do you really think that I will willingly join your little government and give up all my rights? Well guess what I see is a rather large country with over 1,000,000,000 people in it who really dosn't want to be conquered add to that the concept that most of our recently developed nuclear delivery and guidance systems are now in their hands I think that at least a third world war will have to be fought in order to get that kind of thing. Also we see the development of suposedly having a large crash of the stock market and a resulting 1930's era depression occuring. I have had relatives that lived then (they are still alive) and from what they have told me and what I
have read that is a little impossible. Organizations like the SEC and the Treasury department prevent all sorts of nastiness from happening. Add to that the problem with his idea of refugees. There is no way in hell that if you have to leave your home like the Oakies (as he so fondly referred to and the "Grapes of Wrath" boy was that a mistake on his part!)
People who have nothing will not be able to have the finacial resources to have cellular phones, laptops, and web pages.
I just think that the mix of Bradburry and Orwell in this guy's rants is a little extreme and unfounded because there are not a single citation or future prediction in the entire piece. This is more like reading a good piece of poreachy science fiction or perhaps anything by Orwell or Bradburry.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Yes, the market is difficult to predict because the very act of predicting it changes its behavior. It's a positive feedback system. As people try to make predictions faster and faster, the spikes get bigger and bigger. Unless there's some dampening in there, any positive feedback system (that's not at rest) will wind up destroying itself.
--mark
you've all seen the movies of the bridge, right?
IANAE but; Since when does a global currency require a global government? The two can be related, but don't necessarily have to be. Before Uncle Sam got involved, individual banks issued currency (backed, in theory, by material wealth such as gold). While the result was a bit chaotic (enough so to give the government the option of taking over and issuing currency backed by wishful thinking), the same sort of thing could happen again. Imagine if a couple of the bigger (global) financial institutions were to start issuing currency (or coinage?) with an agreement with other such banks to accept their currency/coinage. Printing surplus money (i.e. without something to back it up) would blow their credibility and credit rating (unlike government-based treasuries), and economics would be based on a true "bartering" system rather than the intangible "value" of a piece of green paper...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
You are right, there are a lot of holes in sterling's work, and you hit it on the head when you say that it is talking about things that are today's issues. This is not an article about his prediction of the future. Read his books for that. This is a satire of the problems of today with corporatism and environmental distruction amplified to show their horrors. Everything was so extreme it cannot possibly be a prediction of 35 years from now, instead it simply ridicules the way things are today.
You know, it wouldn't surprise me one bit... Smoking isn't viewed as a health risk by anti-smoking advocates, it's viewed either as being duped by big tobacco companies or being an uncaring jerk evilly infringing on the rights of others to not breathe second-hand smoke (all so clearly outlined in our constitution of course)
Esperandi
The US support of the UN is terrible. We only use them as a tool for justifying the use of force internationally. I think the UN is a great idea. The fact that the US decides to snip its balls and not pay what we owe is our fault not the UN's. What are they supposed to do when we won't give our support?
Mars structures in the desert. This one does truly intruge me. The concept is taken from his book distractions. I could see this happening. When you think of it, the desert has a lot to recommend it. Homogenious terrain, plenty of solar energy. Lacks H2O but oxygen is in plentyful supply, and H is farily easily obtainable from hydrocarbons with a bit of technological advancment. Wouldn't be the first space application to see real world use.
But why would you want to? I mean, the world isn't at all crowded yet -- we don't have to go live in the desert until the rest of the world is full. If we had the population density of Hong Kong or Singapore in a country like the US or Canada or Russia we have a lot more room for people without having to rely on desert occupation. Now if we could grow food in the desert -- that would be something else! Then we could live in non-Mars-like terrain but still take advantage of the deserts so they won't be empty space. If we could genetically engineer veggies to grow with less water, I bet it could be done.
Of course the solar energy idea is brilliant and I am sure that it will start happening very soon -- depends on the price of energy I suppose. Imagine a desert full of plants and solar panels -- a different world indeeed!
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Another poster commented that the 1990s don't look very much like SF writers in the 1960s said they would, either. Bang on.
Bang off, I'd say; check out John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider which was if anything too prescient about some things. And of course totally wrong about others. Thats why it's called science-FICTION
You're not being overly cynical, you just don't understand economics. Sorry for the bluntness.
Ask anyone who works on Wall St. what the purpose of the stock market provides, and they will almost universally give you the same answer: liquidity.
The stock market moves money around the world to the places where it will find the most use. Without this, there would be significanly less innovation and a much lower standard of living in the long term.
You are also a bit wrong about the "Law of Conservation of Wealth" issue. The companies on the market have (mostly) finite amount of stock to sell, but the companies grow. This means that money is not conserved. There is more money and more value out there every day (on average.) This is the whole reason the market provides a rate of return at all.
There is one point that I haven't seen anyone make. Perhaps I just missed it. It just seems pretty obvious to me.
If you build a computer to predict the market and then actively act upon that data, the computer will be influencing the market. If the computer influences the market, then to make any prediction the computer must predict its own behavior. I'm sure you see the recursive and impossible nature of this.
To answer one question I'm guessing some will present: No the computer can not just predict a bit of the market upon which it has not had recent influence. The market is extremely nonlinear. Even worse than billiard balls.
More impressive than the butterfly story: Say you have a frictionless billiards table on which billiard balls are bouncing, and these collisions are lossless (for simplicity). By classical dynamics you can completely determine the positions of the balls at any future time with exact knowledge of the initial positions. Now, if a friend walks into the room durring the experiment, the GRAVITATIONAL force of his body is enough to perturb the system such that your prediction will deviate significantly from reality within 10 collision times.
The market is much more nonlinear than a table full of balls. The point being that it is absolutely impossible to build a computer that would predict the market, and if you did, and used the data, it would no longer be an accurate prediction, because the computer can not take itself into account in the calculation.
So we destroy the delicate environment of the desert, eliminate a few more species (especially those pesky sidewinders), just in the name of somewhere to live? How can you be so insensitive?
Everywhere you live is a trade-off. Every choice you make environmentally is a compromise. We need to learn how to handle where we live before we go and move into a new area. The desert is just as beautiful and valuable as everywhere else in the world, with the single exception of growing food (which is changing). Think about this idea a little further.
AetiusA universal government could certainly enforce the creation and use of a global currency (well, at least at the commercial level) but barring a massive planetary conflict or sudden outbreak of unification fever, I don't think 35 years is enough time for this.
I don't necessarily agree that you do need a universal government to establish a universal currency. Although my knowledge of European affairs isn't vast, I'm still pretty sure there are individual countries therein which have agreed upon using the Euro. :)
Establishing a global currency in a multi-nation world would take time. Just look at the various multinational treaties languishing in the various parliaments and congresses around the world, awaiting ratification. The "globo" could happen, but again I don't think it would happen by 2035. I think a lot of countries outside of Europe would want to study the Euro's long-term effects on countries that use it before implementing a much larger version.
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.
I must respectfully disagree. I cite China and the WTO. Weak-willed politicians will always let greed (for money or power) dictate their actions.
Of course, this only works if you trust the UN. And while I do, I get the feeling that many USAers do not. Am I right in saying this?
You may not be far off the mark. To me, the UN appears to be an ineffectual organization when it comes to anything besides issuing "condemnations" and sponsoring food distribution and immunization programs. I've watched with disgust how the UN had been unable to effectively deal with rogue states such as Iraq, Serbia, Libya and North Korea.
In all fairness, however, my country is awfully damn slow in paying the UN....something not widely reported here.
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.
Other predictions I made:
- The Age Of Nanotech -- an explosion in nanotech development.
- Engineered Humans -- engineering human DNA will create humans with magical abilities.
- Population Crunch -- you may disagree with me on this one. I don't fall into the "technology will save us" crowd on population growth. (But it's an interesting topic for debate).
I explain all my predictions on my website at http://www.waynerad.com/future.I agree with people who say that Bruce's future sounds a bit much like today. When you look at machine intelligence, nanotech, bio engineering, and population effects together, there can be no question that the future will be very different from the past or the present.
Wayne
In an old Second Opinion Column, the author points out that the drugs commonly used in the "cocktail therapy" cause patients (victims) to have strokes, heart attacks and suffer liver and kidney damage, and develop "dangerously high cholesterol and diabetes". It is otherwise healthy people, whose only medical problem is having tested HIV positive, who are the major target for these drugs. So I assume when you say "treatments", you are actually refering to the state-endorsed poisons promoted by industrial medicine & governments.
The same guy also had a column about how some hiv-positive mother of two in canada had her children taken away from her because she refused to put her healthy children on AIDS drugs. She's lived for fourteen years without treatment for or complications from her "infection", and had no intention of sentancing her children to death. Then the canadian government (so-called) take the kids and puts them on drugs. They've since started to develop symptoms common to AIDS patients. Go figure.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Other than the cute sci-fi details (greenleafyshade.com) and the refraction of the economics, the attitude is all now. That jaded, po-mo chatter is sooo yesterday. In two years this article will look as dated as a 1-gig Athlon.
illegitimii non ingravare
We need malaise infected futurists like Sterling and Gibson to get other jobs and stop harping on about the hells of the near future.
I would kill to read a positive, yet realistic, prediction one of these days... but maybe that's just me.
-- kwashiorkor --
Pure speculation gets you nowhere.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
A Globo could work with out a global govenment, and I have always held that the introduction on a global currency would be the first major step on the path to a global govt.
The idea would be to have the UN run the currency show: print, mantain etc. And when a counterfieter is found, the UN would call for aid from member countrys*. As you said, a large counterfieting scheme would be awful. I'm rather certain that the good ol' US of A would lend a hand in bringing any wrong doers to justice.
Of course, this only works if you trust the UN. And while I do, I get the feeling that many USAers do not. Am I right in saying this?
-
* Ok, so not every country is a member of the UN, so it wouldn't actually be a globo. However the benifits gained through being a member would most likely bring all those other countrys running. In fact, it could provide quite good leverage in getting countrys to stop human rights abuses.
Shawn Poulsen (Fruan)
"On Slashdot, many obvious things are insightful." - Annonymous Coward, 2000/7/9
We don't even have polio or smallpox?
IIRC, the russians still have smallpox in military research facilities, and as far as I can remember, these are alot more dangerous than the good ol' smallpox that used to plague the world (these where after all "designed" to do the most possible damage).
Now, the reason I mention this is that I for one don't trust the security at russian military facilities, I clearly remember reading about someone just walking into one of their military bases and stealing some high grade uranium (I don't think he felt so good afterwards though...)
Mikael Jacobson
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Wow. Yet another Capitalism-is-a-magic-bullet-that-will-save-the-en tire-world-and-make-us-all-shiny-happy-p eople-if-you-just-get-out-of-the-way zealot.
Don't believe the hype.
Capitalism is the ideal solution for any situation wherein all costs are borne by their responsible parties. For much of our society this is true, and the free market works well. But it's not ALWAYS true.
Specifically, in the case of environmental degradation, there are several efficiencies that come into play. One base efficiency--really, the major efficiency stressed by pure capitalism is the maximization of pure monetary profit in the foreseeable future. So in the case of MythicalCorp, Inc., if it's possible to save a buck by spewing pollutants into your local river, it's most efficient to do so!
It's easy to argue that it's in the ultimate long-term interest of a corporation to preserve the environment, but how many companies actually do something about it? Very few. Environmental consciousness generally detracts from profits and the vast majority of stockholders, care more about the bottom line than about the long-term environmental consequences of their actions.
Since industry has, time and again, shown itself to not be self-regulating in this respect, I think it's an absolutely appropriate place for the government to get involved. The long-term costs of abusing the environment need to be made felt NOW, especially since a significant portion of the damage inflicted on our environment is not reversible in the short term.
Capitalism is great, but it's not the answer to everything. If given too free a rein, the invisible hand will slap you silly occasionally.
Hmmm... is religion something that people "retreat" into? I'm not meaning to throw bottles from the bleachers here, because I will admit to having little use for religion myself, but I wonder if you're correct about that?
If I may be so bold as to look into my own tea leaves, I think that religion may take a hit from the general fatigues which you suggested (quite astutely, too, I might add!). When religions begin to ply the Internet even more thoroughly than they do now (as members become more net-savvy and access becomes easier), there will be a glut of information, and people will look at the various claims by the different faiths, and either dismiss them as more "over-the-top" marketing or find less differences between the competing creeds.
(N.B. The sig doesn't apply here - I'm not intending to be ironic, as most readers (if any) have probably guessed. :) )
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
speaking of high-tech depressions, who was it who said of the US in the 1930's: "America is the only place where people drove to the poor house"
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'd like to address some of your points.
1) What I mean is that he projects that capitalism utterly beat communism. But if you measure government vs. private sector, you see for the past 200 years, government is taking up an ever increasing share... This is not untrue. However, his point was that multinational corporations will eventually overrun governments, and the governments will even be operating as businesses instead of public-interest organizations; the world that Bruce Sterling's describing, looks a lot like modern feudalism - the exact opposite of communism. Feudalism is pure hypercapitalism on methamphetamines - it's where the people with the big money control your life. See: tyranny of the land holders. Also see: Robocop's OCP, or the Company Town (also look here)...
2) Uh, what riches? You call his situation 'rich'? And most people would love the idea of getting rich without working for it. Ever heard of the Lottery?
3) Sterling is wise to lambast the problem of the huge population and the lack of children. Look at what he said: his own life expectancy is 110 years. People in his generation, and probably the one before, are going to grow to be very old and gray. To say nothing of the newborns of his time, who would live to be 150. Not seeing my point yet? Go check out Japan. Lots and lots of old folks. Fewer and fewer workers to support them. Their economy is taking serious hits from this burden and it hasn't even started to affect them yet. In Sterling's time and scenario, you have 7 billion people, aging to over 100 years average, and very few kids coming up to support them. This will result in an extremely top heavy population (age wise), and in the US the social security burden would take our crushed economy (in his scenario) and grind it into powder. You'll also see a sharp rise in forced euthanasia, because in that ultra market driven world, an elderly person who is just too expensive to keep providing medical care for, and so on, will be "encouraged" (very strongly so) to put an end to the burden on their family, by visiting Kervorkian. This already DID happen in Germany. A top heavy population with no hope in sight for a baby boom, is one of the worst possible economic situations a nation can get into, and it is guaranteed to cause either a depression, or a national policy switch to the game of lifeboat ethics. Do the 'math' on the dynamics of a population with a less than 1.8 child per couple ratio sometime.
Sterling's scenario isn't perfect; nobody's is. But his scenario is more realistic than you think.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I have predicted, several times, to several persons, and even written a paper (part of a business plan) about how in the future, economists will finally discover the concept of limits (well-known to other mathematicians) because of the Internet, particularly that most popular part of it known as the Web. This guy is correct about the overvaluation, but I doubt he understands exactly which kinds of business models will work. After all, he thought Amazon.Com would someday return a profit sufficient to pay off that enormous capitalization, proving he doesn't even understand the way the 'Net transforms ordinary retailing!
Btw, in a second (smaller) paper, I have described how publishing predictions such as this fellow just made actually produce the result... The entire capitalization machine (based on shares, stocks, etc.) has, via changing technology (and its increasing ubiquity!), become a mechanism with ever-decreasing periodicity and ever-increasingly efficient positive feedback loops (in the engineering sense).
Capitalism is a very specific system (using money to make money) arising from the historically brief age of industrialization... Further, we now live in the age of cooperation and specialization, not competition. Economists who can make this adjustment to a new paradigm are, of course, few and far between! They think the entire world has always run the way it ran for just the past few centuries, and have invested an enormous amount of learning time, professional experience, and ego in it.
If you really understood that "publishing predictions such as this fellow just made actually produce the result.." you (and the poor fools you teach) would no longer be putting practically all your eggs in the basket called "the market." You see, the economy is doing fine, but the capitalization schema currently in use in that economy are doomed... precisely because the market is going up because it is going up, then going down because it is going down. I'm not going to explain it again... if you want an explanation, simply read a little engineering. Specifically, read about positive feedback loops, then think about their relevance to the technological changes still taking over the classical "market" (bonds, stocks, options, whatever).
There is no adjustment that economists need to make to figure out the difference between today and the early period of industrialization.
Uh, huh -- so of course if you had a great idea for some new product you would be out there trying to raise all the capital to create all the pieces yourself, right? Then you'd hire the cheapest possible workers to asssemble the whole thing (on an assembly line) yourself -- and market to the whole world instead of any niche market... You wouldn't be at all interested in trying to create standards, or find out what economic "ecosystem" you fit... Yeah, right.
Try reading Moore's "The Death of Competition." He may not have the whole picture, but he's got more on the ball than you do!
I realized we don't live in the age of competition when I founded my first company. It was really obvious -- I was attempting to fill a whole in the existing business landscape, after all.
Your citing Intel vs. AMD almost makes my point for me. How likely are others to get into the chip-production business these days? How likely is that both of these will survive, long-term, unless they specialize?
Let's take Transmeta (new chip manufacturer) as an example, okay? Their new chip(s) were developed to fill a very specific niche market not addressed by the two established manufacturers. If either Intel or AMD were making low-voltage processors, Transmeta would not have invested their years of work and millions of dollars to bring their expensive product to market.
Everyone in the U.S. (a society at the extreme end of the individual/tribal spectrum) has been subjected over and over to the insistence that human society is competitive. Try counting the number of cooperative vs. competitive acts you perform everyday, and you'll get a better picture of reality.
Btw, economic theory really is in a pitiful state. See the recent Science News article about physicists barging into the economists' business, and you may begin to get some sense of the paucity of valuable constructs (let alone testable hypotheses -- forget whole theories!) in the field.
I would agree with most of what you said, but it isn't true that we can't compensate for human stupidities: Stupidity rules only in highly individualistic societies like this (i.e., in the U.S.). For an available counter-example, go to any theatre with a decent-sized audience. You will observe the audience is almost always as smart, alert, receptive, and sensitive as its smartest, most alert, etc. members! (For us playwrights, this is a wonderful fact, over which we rejoice, and on which we depend.) This even holds true in some cinemas. Humans were created social, and in appropriate social groupings, stupidity is quite often held in check, or at least over-ruled.
After reading this article, I find myself wondering exactly how far away we are from a "globo", universal currency. The idea seems to work at least decently in Europe, right? My first reaction is that a globo would be a wonderful thing, until I really sat down to think about it.
Having a universal economic currency would almost certainly require a universal government. Otherwise, what would prevent some poor country from printing up 2 or 3 extra billion globos, to bail them out of economic crisis? If this were to happen, then the obvious inflation that would occur would in fact be horrible, and could lead to a horrible economic collapse as is portraid in the article.
However, if we just adopt a global government, could that work at all? I know that the world is smaller with today's fast computers and quick internet connections, in addition to telephones and televison, but it still reminds me too much of a modern Roman Empire. Rome was a wonderful empire while it lasted, but the area it covered was just too vast to manage.
So after reading the article, and thinking for a few minutes, I think that the safest possible economic course for the future is to avoid things like the "globo".
Heh I have never been a big sci-fi fan. Dunno why.. guess im just lazy but midieval fantasy has always been more interesting to me Some of the time I feel like im trapped in the twenty-first century. I would have liked being a crazy foot solider who only had to live for 20-30 years :-)
ja
California is full of migrating Okies again, only this time the Okies have laptops, Web pages, and cell phones. It's basically a Grapes of Wrath thing, only they're logging frequent-flier miles.
And reading his writing is a much richer multi-media experience if you've heard him giving readings enough to know his voice, with that California valley accent, so out of place in Texas, fondling every word like stream water rolling over pebbles. Oooooh...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"A Deepness In The Sky" by Vernor Vinge is set 10,000 years in the future (or is that 300 giga seconds?) and they are still counting from year zero *nix time. Hah! Page 225 if you can't grep your paper edition.
I have always enjoyed Mr. Sterling's work. It has been a while since I read any of his SciFi. In 2035 'nix will run out of ticks. On the 12 hour special New Years shift we mused that we wouldn't be taking another one then. Personally I'll be 85 and hope to see it. Plan 9 or a 128 bit clock?
This also seems to be a vision of an Objectivist society, with its absolute minimal government, privatization of everything, contractualization of all relations, and self-centeredness. Some of the likely consequenses of implementation of Objectivism are also here. However, apparently, this Objectivism has been achieved without the proverbial Atlas Shrugging, but through gradual transition.
All in all, the society presented seems, as author contends, very dull. I wouldn't be surprised if it had a high suicide rate. The contention that the consumer society has burnt out and only continues to exist because nobody can think of anything better to do, or, for that matter anything else to do is, in my opinion, a possible future, but, chances are, the hype will go on for much longer: there are always more techno-toys to build. If the hypothetical state of affairs is achieved, will it last forever? I doubt it. There would still be some "Earth shaking" developments eventually. Super-human AI is one that is bound to occurr sooner or later. Then there is the possibility of a religious backlash resulting in a theocracy or a de facto theocracy, but I don't want to start a flame war, so I won't elaborate on that.
At the same time, the possibility of the environmental degradations resulting in extinctions of all species that human's don't want to have bears an eerie resemblance to H. G. Wells Time Machine, where the environment of Earth was customized heavily, being one of the causes of the devolution of humanity that the book described.
And, by the way, I don't think SETI @ Home program the author referred to will survive that long: by then, individual computers at the observatories will be powerful enough to do all the analyses from all the radiotelescopes in real time, and no new observatories are likely to be built for the same reason as the reason for nobody colonizing Mars and low birthrates: there is no profit in it.
You can argue that the market provides value as
a vehicle for hedging. Remember hedging is like
insurance, you create a position to protect
yourself against risk exposure that you cannot
otherwise control.
In order for people and companies to have the
ability to hedge, there needs to be liquidity.
That is where the speculative traders come in.
Speculative traders are not protecting, they are
gambling. But they are needed by the hedgers
because they provide someone to trade with.
What you are arguing is that volatility tends to increase with time unless there are dampening factors. Well there are dampening factors: transaction costs, capital gains tax, and eight hour trading days. I sure you can list more but this is a start. In a lot of ways we are tending toward decreasing each of these factors, for example going to a 24 hour trading day, but I for one am not scared of out of control volatility.
Wonder what he meant by that. Did he mean unemployment? Accidental deaths? Failed corporations?
More likely he meant two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, and numerous other conflicts. The industrial revolution shifted around tons of political power, and gave suddenly-powerful factions lots of new technology with which to Do Things.
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
"the Persian Gulf War, involved a minute fraction of the population of the coalition nations." Of course, the coalition nations were not the only populations involved. 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the fighting. The vast majority of the population of Iraq continues to suffer under the UN sanctions. Whether "we live in a world of peace" is true depends on which world you live in.
-- Why is there blue shit all over MY shit?! -Josh in Blair Witch Project
Why? Because I really do think it's a blight on the planet. The stock market floats, Laputa-like, over the world of actual work, descending only to gather wealth or crush upstarts.
It produces no goods or services (unless you count separating day-traders from their money and making rich people richer), places corporations in the hands of absentee owners who will cheerfully self-destruct the whole shebang in exchange for a momentary stock uptick, and drains off smart folks who might otherwise be working on a cure for acne into the ever-hallowed cause of Getting Even Richer.
I know I'm ranting here, but I really don't get it. Just what ueful purpose _does_ the stock market have, socially? It came within pretty close to ruining this country back in 1929, and the great political thinkers in DC have even been thinking about linking the welfare of old folks to it. (This may be the second-dumbest idea Bill Clinton's ever had.)
As for the 'law of conservation of wealth', isn't that sort of true for the stock market? If the price of a stock goes up, and someone decides to cash in their chips, that money doesn't grow on trees. If everyone sold their stock at once, the system would fold like any other bookie who'd failed to cover his bets.
Maybe I'm just jealous because I haven't become outrageously rich selling stock in a company that can't make any profit. Maybe.
"Oh, shut up and eat your stock options!"
>On the other hand, if everyone adopts your scheme, the result would be the ad absurdum
>situation where everyone wins all the time; surely the market cannot function in such a fashion.
Au contraire, that's exactly what the market is for. The "someone wins, someone loses" mentality about the market is common among lay folks (like myself, I Am Not An Economist), especially those of a scientific bent, as it plays to a certain hypothetical Principle of Conservation of Wealth.
But economics simply doesn't work that way. If that were the case, then taking that concept ad absurdam, we'd all still be having to share the same meager wealth that the first few thousand proto-humans had a few million years ago, among the six billion of us.
Markets exist to generate wealth, not simply to redistribute it. It could be theoretically possible to have an everyone-wins-always market, but your point about uncertainty is valid -- there's just too much chaos there to predict with any more accuracy than, say, the weather.
--
Say that I buy an x% share of the fresh water in the area. (I want to drink, wash dishes and use the restroom after all) Then anyone who wanted to dump in the river would have to pay me for the reduction in value of my share. If they failed to do so, a class action lawsuit would get the attention of PoluterCorp's board of directors in a big #$%@ hurry.
The problem with a private trust is in what happens to the destitute. Presumably, if you bought x% share of the fresh water for your necessities, then presumably a person who has no money for whatever reason cannot legally urinate, drink, or bathe. That would make for a rather Pythonesque scene in the unemployment office to say the least.
What we have now is a system of public trust where government is supposed to handle problems of pollution. Unfortunatly, the current government consistantly fails to do so, and the public doesn't seem to realise that government is supposed to belong to THEM.
The problem is not too much capitolism, or not enough. The problem is that corperations as legal entities accidentally re-create the perfect model of a sociopath. Recent psychological research has shown that if two people are paired together, one who only follows orders, and one who only gives them, each will feel that they have no responsability for the consequences of their actions. Together, they become capable of actions that would be too repugnant for either to do alone. Compare to a modern corperation where stockholders abstractly urge ever increasing profits, and executives give the orders but never actually watch them carried out. Meanwhile you have workers who carry no authority and only a small individual value to the corperatin. Each absolves him/herself of the crime.
Stockholder: "I never said to do that! I just said make more profit.", Executives: "If I don't give the order, the stockholders would just replace me with someone who will. And I'll be sued in the bargain". Worker: "It's not my decision. Besides, if I don't, I'll get fired and they'll get someone else to do the same thing.".
This is one of the most ignorant criticisms that I have ever seen.
I have no idea where you got your ideas about what economists thing, but it certainly didn't come from anything vaguely resembling the last couple of years of mainstream economics.
Yes, we're quite aware of the existence of limits. Perhaps this is why we teach about them in class . . . However, we also teach about why Malthus was wrong.
Ans as far as you realization that "publishing
predictions such as this fellow just made actually produce the
result.." . . . no kidding; we expect people to demonstrate an understanding of this to pass an introductory class in the field.
There is no adjustment that economists need to make to figure out the difference between today and the early period of industrialization. A "new paradigm"? Give it a rest.
On the other hand, if you think that there's a conflict between cooperation and competition, you probably have a very odd idea of what competition is.
Go find another type of straw man to troll about.
Imagine a science-fiction writer in 1900 looking forward to the level of productivity and automation of 2000. What would he write? Probably nothing very different from what Sterling wrote.
History isn't over, neither is economics. In 1900, many intellectuals forsaw a future of peace and leisure, where everyone would be rich. It didn't happen for them, and it won't happen for us. Conflict is plentiful; markets still fail; governments still fail; there's no real movement towards better medicine for most, much less all, of the people; economists are still better at telling you what went wrong than at predicting what will go wrong next; and wealth still accumulates at the top (even more than it used to).
Recent history is full of the failed attempts of those who believed that markets would act rationally. The LTCM collapse is just the latest in a long line of failed "systems" for beating the averages. People know that won't work at the race track or the blackjack table, and Sterling should know better than to believe it's any different for markets.
Each era's political and economic certainies are the next's discredited superstitions. Don't be so sure it's any different for capitalism various stripes and schools than it was for Marxism's. Sterling's prediction of the end of the Third World at the hands of the 'Net is as premature as the same prediction was at the end of imperialism.
Sterling's discomfort with the commodification of everything is today's problem. I'm already burned out on the Digital Revolution - so are most people. Sterling's anti-historicism - scepticism that progress is leading somewhere - is also today's issue. It was also the issue in 1900, and 1800, and 1600, and 1000 for all I know. We struggle on, finding meaning in history only when it's over.
The real issue is the lack of willingness to work for progress. We don't have convincing goals, or even real expectations that the world can and will improve if we work for it. That is where our malaise comes from - the belief that as much as the world sucks we can't do any better.
I fear Sterling isn't doing much to fight that notion, and the only good excuse for it is that no one else is either.
Bruce Sterling is the best 'post-cyberpunk' author I've ever read, and he consistently lays out interesting scenarios for what a extremely high tech culture might be like.
His environmental rants are not at all off base.. capitalism != environmental havoc? No more than communism, certainly (have you seen the state of play in the former Warsaw Pact countries? Bruce has..), but billions upon billions of consumers eat a lot of raw land and resources, and the extinction rate since humans became civilized has been higher than at any time since the dinosaurs died. That's a bit of environmental havoc for you, right there.
The notion that government subsidizing is at the root of all harm from capitalism is misguided.. the market, as currently structured, is not capable of accurately accounting all the costs of consumerism. Capitalism is efficient at what it does, and it's the best thing going by all means, but it's only the best thing, not the perfect thing.
Which is what Bruce was saying.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
What do you think the remark about intellectual property lawyers acting like Mafia dons was referring to?
The population growth rate is slowing down, so your assumption that growth continues at its current rate is suspect. I don't think that Sterling's number is that unreasonable. If we don't find an AIDS treatment that can be massively deployed in the 3rd world soon, Sterling's number may be on the high side; AIDS is taking out a whole generation in Africa and parts of Asia.
>Cute, but nothing special. It reads like an off-the-cuff story he gave to Fortune either because they'd asked him for some comments on the
>future or just because all the usual SF markets turned it down.
IIRC, there used to be a lot more or these kind of sf-narrative-as-essay stories around twenty or twenty-five years ago. About things like how we all would be looking forward to eco-disaster by the first decade of the 21st century. Or how the US & the USSR would cripple each other with a nuclear exchange, leaving Europe & Japan to pick up the pieces -- or loot the finest minds to benefit their universities.
A few decades later, I find myself a little older, probably more sick of hearing myself start *any* statement with ``I remember when" than any of you might be, & also notice things never got as bad as these stories predicted. The oceans did not die in one, mutant algeal bloom -- but we seem to be losing a lot of amphibian species. We haven't had to worry about nuclear war for over a decade, but you still wouldn't want to spend a night in a Russian jail -- or be an avowed Communist in most US ones.
People who predict the future forget how slow it takes some changes to come to pass: yes, you can connect to the Internet in almost every country of the world by phone, but in most countries the biggest challenge is to find a phone that works well enough to transmit at 9600 cps. And outside of North America, you are going to pay for that connection by the minute or second.
On the other hand, some changes happen at a pace we never foresee: about 35 years ago, I saw an exhibit at OMSI here in Portland, where a number of different people had built their own computers -- refrigerator-sized contraptions made of wood & wire with all of the computing power of a contemporary hand calculator & I wondered if I would ever be able to own one like them. My Linux box at home can crunch numbers faster than the high-end mainframes of that day.
In short, some things have gotten a little worse -- & that sucks -- while some things have gotten a little better -- & that's cool. And many things are different than they used to be.
My guess is that people who used to write pieces like this one realized that the future was going to be so different from their guesses that they lost interest in prognosticating. While people will continue to screw up & cause some things to get worse, they will also screw up & be unable to intentionally make other things worse. And the converse -- that is, people will strive towards improvements -- will also be true. Not so much balancing one another as keeping the current hobo's stew well stirred & free of scalding on the bottom.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Those of us who read Bruce's work frequently know that he's got a bunch of futures in his head, and he's not revealing which one he's betting on. In fact, since he revealed this one, I'd be willing to wager it's not the one he's wagering on.
I find it interesting how he's borrowed from several of his recent novels, all of which I've enjoyed immensely. From Distraction (my latest favorite) we have the technologically-inclined economic nomads ('technomads?'), i.e. Okies with Cellphones. And he alludes to the social problems that come with life extension technology, as he depicted brilliantly in Holy Fire. I'm sure there's more but I read most of his other fiction so long ago that plots and titles become blurred.
As an engineer who studies complex systems, however, I have to willfully suspend disbelief in this premis that "you can't repeal the business cycle." My regard for this statement, simply put, is that the business cycle is an emergent process of an artificial system, so by altering the system you can indeed "repeal" any cycle you like. You just have to understand what you've created, and where you've let chaos creep in. By using that verb, Bruce skillfuly makes you infer that it's a natural law, unviolable, predestined.
But the unrepealable business cycle is a very good premise for a work of speculative fiction, and I think he could have milked it for more than just a couple thousand words... and he may yet. O
I can see the fnords!
I see what you men but you have to remember that a story isn't always "about" what it purports to be "about".
Moreover, whether it's intentional or not, the future economic system described by Sterling isn't capitalism.
Capitalism - by definition - is a system in which one needs capital in order to make serious money, and without it you can only sell your labour for much more modest returns.
But you may have noticed that even the presently nascent "New Economy" Sterling referred to is vastly different to the old one. It empowers people with ideas and the get-up-and-go to pursue them by (i) eliminating the requirement for significant capital in many cases, particularly where in the so-called "knowledge-based" economy; and (ii) making capital much easier to obtain when it's required (venture capitalists are ten-a-penny these days).
In the old days capitalism was a barrier to entry for most people - you needed to own a shitload of money just to get started. But nowadays any US college graduate with a bright idea and good presentation skills can have a go. All he needs is to save up about $5000 - enough to cover a deposit on a car, an apartment, a cell phone and a computer with an internet connection.
In Sterling's vision of the future everybody is in business for themselves. Yay! He paints it as a bit dystopian, but I don't think that's because everyone's self-employed, it's because he apparently thinks the cultural and environmental atrocities committed by old-style corporate capitalists will continue even after capitalism has been replaced by a truly free market.
Perhaps he's right about that and perhaps not, I don't know. But there are plenty of people around today who'll attest to the fact that perpetual rapid change does lead to distinctly dystopian feelings of alienation. The "Kids today! Pah! What's the world coming to!" viewpoint has been voiced since at least the ancient Greeks, but rapidly evolving technology certainly adds new fuel to the fire.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I find it utterly unbelievable that anybody would moderate this troll as "insightful". Shoeboy, you missed the point completely: Sterling isn't taking a swipe at capitalism per se, he's just warning us about change and reminding us that our narrow little late-twentieth-century perspective (for that is what it still is) must bear very little resemblance to the world as it will be in 35 years time. And he's even given us a little peek at what it might be like to live in a society whose equilibrium point is continual and rapid technological change - which does clearly seem to be exactly where we are heading.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Is 2000 that similar to 1960?
...the world of 2040 won't feel that different from today, for those of us who live through it --- but, taken as snapshots, and then compared, they would be completely different.
;o)
I still think so.
Microwave ovens...Cable TV...VCRS/CDs
I *did* already concede that we have a few more gadgets now. But I don't think they have made such a huge difference to the way we live our lives or the way we think and act. We've been watching far too much TV ever since the damn thing was invented.
the internet and computers
The internet certainly has the potential to revolutionize society and adically alter the way we live. But for the vast majority of people this just hasn't happened yet. We're still mostly stuck in 1960.
artificial hearts
To the best of my knowledge we *still* don't have artificial hearts outside of the laboratory (and even within the laboratory it's not really changing anyone's life - the recipients of these implants don't last very long and they have to stay in bed hooked up). Of course ordinary transplant surgery was still in its infancy back then but even now it only affects a very small number of people.
AIDS
In 1960 there was gonorrhea, syphilis and herpes. During the late 1980's and early-to-mid 1990's there was a paranoia about AIDS that has no 1960's parallel. But it seems to have mostly gone away by now perhaps because the most sexually active generation today is young enough to have grown up taking AIDS for granted.
[increased] gasoline prices
This hasn't changed anybody's life. Increased earnings have offset this taxation and you don't see people giving up their cars as a result.
The trick is --- it doesn't _feel_ that different, to anyone who lived through it. But in reality, we're a completely different society;
I don't think there's any evidence to support that view.
I won't argue with you there as I've no idea what 2040 will be like. The pace of change does appear to be increasing though and - apart from widespread Internet use - there are a number of potentially life-changing technologies *possibly* just over the horizon (nanotechnology, longevity treatments, true AI, mind uploading, cheap fusion energy, cheap space travel etc).
In my opinion the only thing coming up that will make a really significant difference will be a vastly increased active lifespan. How will a society dominated by middle-aged centenarians work? I'm *dying* to find out
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Since he's talking about economics I'm certain he's referring to economic casualties, i.e. people who lost their shirt either through worthless investments, hyperinflation, obsolescence of certain labor skillsets, or environmental damage.
Mind you, famine and disease are often caused by economics. So are wars. Gee, when you think about it, an awful lot of bad shit can happen. Us late-twencen Western babies sure have had it easy so far, haven't we! But this cosy world of television, leisure time and suburban homes for the masses has only been around for a very short time relatively speaking. The chances are still very strong that much of our future will look more like our past than our present. Be scared.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
who in 1960 would not have been surprised by the world of 2000?
<br><br>
Bad example. IMHO the world of 2000 is not that different from the world of 1960. If people of the 1960's could suddenly be transported here I think the only thing that would surprise them is that so little has changed. A few more gadgets in people's homes, a different economic policy in Russia. That's about it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Of course, Extrans support might have worked better in 1960 than it apparently does now...:o/
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
In the early 1900's there was the labor movement, in the 50's and 60's we had civil and social movements. In general these things lead to a better society, even if it wasn't revolutionary. The time may be coming again soon.
It seems fairly clear to me that the next revolution is brewing already, right here, right now. The people vs. the Intellectual Property Robber Barons of the media/software industries.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Good gravy, the man's making sense! Is that allowed?
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I normally like Sterling's work, but I have to say that this piece was a disappointment.
:) Anyone who rests on their laurels keeps them in the wrong place.
Science fiction authors usually take something that they see in the present, extrapolate it into a potential future, and see what shakes loose. It makes for interesting reading, and it often makes the author seem pretty insightful. Not this time.
The idea of economic collapse and everyone hustling in the future has been around since the dawn of cyberpunk, at least since Neuromancer, if not since Do Androids Dream... Sterling took a similar tack to Gibson, in his Islands in the Net (1989?) where global international corporations have replaced nations - where all you have, do and think is corporate and your employer counts for more than your ethnicity. There were hustlers and up-starts in that world too, and the economy was completely different.
Environmental collapse was probably best described in Heavy Weather (1993?) - another great one by Sterling. Remember the flying cow in Twister? Guess where that came from!
So how is this rant on topic? Well, the reason I didn't care much for this piece, and why I don't think it deserved a place in Fortune (or anywhere else besides B.S.'s (heh!) private site) is that it was recycled material from years ago. Now, I'm all for code reuse and non-duplication of effort, but recycled creativity is an oxymoron.
I suspect that this was written for money, so maybe this sort of hit-and-run commentary writing is the second of Bruce's upcoming 37 companies.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
If I draw on my ability to bullshit - earned in English Lit many years ago....
Sterling's quip that the market has been made deterministic by the application of enough computing power suggests that enormous computing power is available.
This computing power can also be applied to making sure that corporations *perform* deterministically - hence the market is deterministic, and there are no misconceptions, hunches or secrets.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Of all Internet companies, "75 percent will disappear within five years, and 75 percent will never make money, or sell themselves," Blodget said at the Silicon Alley 2000 Internet conference.
He declined, however, to predict which companies would survive and which would die.
This is a real easy prediction to make. The same is true for all companies. The internet weirdness is that the companies that don't survive are still making a pretty big splash before they go.
So in the case of MythicalCorp, Inc., if it's possible to save a buck by spewing pollutants into your local river, it's most efficient to do so!
Ok, I'll bite. There's another aspect to pollution that I didn't address, and that's the issue of ownership. Nobody owns the local river, so the company doesn't have to pay to pollute. That's a problem. So what's the answer? Well government ownership sure isn't the answer. Let's take a look at two issues, logging and grazing permits. Timber companies don't care about clear cutting national forests, and ranchers don't care about overgrazing them. If anyone could buy either a) the land or b) a usage permit then the Sierra club could pay money for a plot and then not let anyone graze or cut. That would be great. I'd start contributing to the Sierra club if this were the case. Small ranching operations would go broke and the price of beef would go up, but that's ok since meat isn't all that healthy. Let's pick another example, air pollution. Most air pollution is caused by automobile traffic and not by big evil companies. If you had to pay for road construction and maintenance + traffic cops through gas taxes + vehicle taxes alone, you'd have a greater cost of transportation. This would make public transit profitable (or less unprofitable at any rate) and put a damper on both air pollution and suburban sprawl. Now lets take your example of the river dumping. Say that I buy an x% share of the fresh water in the area. (I want to drink, wash dishes and use the restroom after all) Then anyone who wanted to dump in the river would have to pay me for the reduction in value of my share. If they failed to do so, a class action lawsuit would get the attention of PoluterCorp's board of directors in a big #$%@ hurry.
See, the market can solve these problems, but only if we can put a price on the environment, and only the market can determine the price of a good.
And don't go saying that life, or clean air or a sunset is priceless. That's a load of crap. Price is a measure of value. If something doesn't have a price, it doesn't have value.
--Shoeboy
If I learned anything during my time as an english major it was this:
Don't be an english major, drop out and become a programmer.
But I learned many things as an english major and one of them is how to read a text.
Let's start with the section, title and subtitle:
The Capitalist Century
Hard Times A Letter from 2035 You had the Depression, irrational exuberance, and Okies. It's just the same in 2035, except now the Okies have cell phones.
Wow, it sure seems like this article is about capitalism and probably about capitalism from a historical perspective. I doubt Mr. Sterling was unaware that this was part of Fortune's the capitalist century. Looks like he's probably down on capitalism too.
Another bit.
But given that I'm up here in 2035 enduring a major economic depression, while you're back there in 2000 spewing your pollutants, smoking cigarettes, and having unprotected sex, I hope you don't mind if I frankly get a few things off my chest.
What we have here is a classic "cranky old guy bitching about kids today" bit that we all recognize from talking to our grandfather. The purpose of this bit elevate the speaker into a position of moral authority. The message here is that pollution, nicotine and unprotected sex are immoral. (Not foolish or self-destructive mind you, but immoral) Go ahead, show me something from the article that indicates that either Mr. Sterling intended this in an ironic tone, or that he retracted it.
Next bit:
In the old days, a depression like this would have provoked a lot of extremism, maybe even a revolution. Fortunately, we're no longer aware of any alternative to capitalism. In fact, we don't even use the word. Capitalism dropped permanently out of fashion a couple of decades after its old enemy communism died off. Here in 2035 it feels old-fashioned even to say that you're "in business." The market has privatized everything privatizable, so everybody and his sister is in business. Business is so taken for granted that it has become invisible--like clocks or running water or forks. You only notice it when it's not going on.
Mr. Sterling's assertion seems to be that modern capitalism is barren and soul destroying.
Now come on. Tell me that this article isn't anti-capitalist.
Now he may be critiquing the worship of money and the addictive drive to accelerate money making, but the word he uses is capitalism and it's not an accident. He's too competent to use a word he doesn't mean. And he's not proffering alternatives, he's not saying step back and enjoy the finer things, he's just saying capitalism will inevitably lead to a distopian society. It's a whiny rant. (not unlike mine)
--Shoeboy
If human life was priceless could you sue for wrongful death?
If human life was priceless, would be allow airlines to operate? What about cars?
No, human life has a price and for my family and loved ones it's every bit of money, time and effort that I can give. That means something. "Priceless" means nothing.
--Shoeboy
Computers don't correctly guess the future of the market because they're perfect. They're correct because people listen to the computers and everyone's computers are very similar. If every computer on Wall Street predicts that AT&T is going to drop, what does everyone do? Sells AT&T. What happens? AT&T's stock price goes down. They touch on this in the movie Pi (where I stole the example from), and obviously the global economy is a more complicated system then that. No matter how stupid or crazy people are, if we turn all the decision making over to the computers, it all becomes predictable.
-B
bruce didn't tell us if coke or pepsi won world war III.
i am... therefore i think
What I mean is that he projects that capitalism utterly beat communism. But if you measure government vs. private sector, you see for the past 200 years, government is taking up an ever increasing share. Right now, government is about 50% of our GNP for industrialized nations. Except for a minor blip in the 1980s, this has always been on an upward trend. By my chart, it looks like in 2035, government will account for about 75% of GNP. Doesn't sound like capitalism wins to me.
In a similar vein, Sterling lambasts the hustle/bustle of the economy where "there's no place to be but in business". Mathematically, what he is saying he wants to share in the riches, but he resents having to work for it.
In the same article, he lambasts a huge population and the unavoidable environmental results, yet he lambasts an economy that doesn't reward mothers, so there are fewer children.The Kama Sutra says that people are prisoners of their own fears and prejudices. The prejudices Sterling has is that there are too many people consuming resources, but not enough children.
Anyway, I've run on too long. My statement is simply that I'm really irritated by people who can't do the math.
IMHO, the stock market is counterintuitive. Here's what I mean. If it was intuitive, professional money managers would understand it and regularly beat the S&P equation. This doesn't happen. If it was non-intuitive, then money managers would do about as well as dartboards. This doesn't happen either.
However, the market is nonintuitive--the pros, by the act of thinking about it, do worse than randomly.
--The basis of all love is respect
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
As usual Sterling has some rather interesting things to say. And as usual some people are taking this as him saying that this is what the future will be. Heinlein once said that it does not pay a prophet to be too specific. When someone does something like this it is more along the lines of "Think about these things and where they are going." This probably won't be the future any more then the 90's were any more like the old pulps but it does make you ask "What is my future (and my children's) and what do I want to do with it?"
Check out his Viridian movement (sorry don't have a link right now; if someone could give it I would be appreciative) and see what it has to say. We do have the world in a grip that is on course to cause some rather interesting consequences. And don't forget the old saying "May you live in interesting times" was a curse.
All righty then. One last: what if you spill the toxic crap into the small stream that you yourself own? Are you going to sue you? How about if a whole bunch of major polluting industries get together and buy up most of the mississippi river system? (If it can be privately owned, it can & will be bought and sold)
Intolerant people should be shot.
A stream that doesn't leave your property? Only way I can see that is if your 'stream' is part of a river delta on your oceanfront property, in which case it still flows into the ocean, that must be owned by someone for your... scheme... to work. Ah, I see, consumner boycotts will protect us from the mega-corporations. Heh. Riiiiight... When many companies are the only source of products you want, or competing versions of the product are all produced by subsidiaries of member corporations? There's already damn few large, independant companies that are actually producing anything you or I buy. Do you actually see this as changing in the future when news of mega-mergers barely gets off the business page anymore?
Intolerant people should be shot.
The owner of the river? The owner of the environments? Excuse me? Can I have some of what you're on?
Intolerant people should be shot.
OK, what are your parents worth? Your children? The love of / Your love for your S.O.? Cherised belongings from your childhood? Freedom of speech? The ability to sit at home peacefully and not have someone bash down your door and sell you some crap? Your faith in whatever religion you subscribe to?
Intolerant people should be shot.
Cute. I suspect he'll be proved right on some of it. Load a shotgun with enough pellets and you're bound to hit something. But I doubt we'll see the end of laywers as a profession (even excepting IP laywers). Human nature is just that way, when something goes wrong we want the ability to blame someone, anyone, other then ourselves and the legal system with the lawyers allows that to happen.
:)
:)
Global currency. Could happen, never would have guessed that the EU would agree on the Euro myself.
Predicting the market? Sorry, too much chaos there. We still can't get the weather parterns right, in another 35 yrs we're gonna get something as chaotic as human expectations, buying patterns and new IPOs down pat? No, not buying Bruce.
Mars structures in the desert. This one does truly intruge me. The concept is taken from his book distractions. I could see this happening. When you think of it, the desert has a lot to recommend it. Homogenious terrain, plenty of solar energy. Lacks H2O but oxygen is in plentyful supply, and H is farily easily obtainable from hydrocarbons with a bit of technological advancment. Wouldn't be the first space application to see real world use.
I do disgree with the commercial inviability of space though. I believe that ore mining from asteriods will become commercially viable in the next 40-70 yrs. Which admitably puts us beyond 2035, but not much.
Seti@home. Who knows? It's a lottery, only cheaper
Anyways, those are my thoughts, take em or leave me, I don't have any better precognative skills then Bruce Sterling, but I figured I'd load up my shotgun too
-- Minupla
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
If you read a lot of that era's SF, you'll notice that nearly all of the exciting trends of the second half of the century were missed while nearly all of the new, exciting technologies the stories talked about didn't pan out. It is like Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, set around now, which has a fully functioning moon base controlled by one computer with 70k of core memory.
If you look at the SF of the fifties (and any other descriptions of the future) you'll see that it is all about atomic power and spaceships. Barely a word about things like computers, biotechnology and the like. It is very possible that "nanotechnology" is the flying car of 2050.
The cake is a pie
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd.
The cake is a pie
The cake is a pie
Have you ever seen the Jetson's episode where Judy get so stressed out each morning doing housework (pressing in about 5 buttons)? So thus they get a maid to save her from all that aggrevating work.
:)
You cannot judge misery strictly on a relative scale. There will ALWAYS be people who are on top, whether that's because of their drive, their heritage, or their desire. Humans are social animals, we like to have an alpha leader to follow. Similarily, there will always be people who are poor and miserable because they're forced to press in 5 buttons in the morning to do their housework.
There will always be `misery' because humans will always look toward leaders, there will always be jealousy at how well the affluent seem to live. [and you never about the downsides of that life.] There will always be people who don't want, don't wish, or won't strive to improve change their life. I don't see any of this changing.
For a few anecdotes.. There are people who are genius-level and should be in a university, but live much like the absent-minded professor, collecting and playing with toys. Also, a not-insignifigant percentage of the homeless chose that lifestyle.
For myself.. You couldn't GIVE me a a couple of million dollars right now. I would refuse. I don't want it, and I don't need it warping my life.. Am I mad, am I stupid, am I one of those 'avoidable misery' cases? No. I want to continue my life by becoming a graduate student, and then go into industry; inventing neat stuff. Too much money would warp that life and seduce me away from my dreams.
Oh, and if anyone has a few million they want to offer; ask me in 5-10 years.
The 2038 bug is sure to pull them out of that depression!
Sterling writes "OK" soft-scifi cyberpunk books that require no in-depth knowledge of science of mathematics, but whenever he opens his mouth about real issues, he puts his foot in it, even as he proclaims on his fuzzy-headed Viridian site "I am a futurist!, so I know what I talking about." (Futurists have about zero credibility in predicting anything)
Sterling's ideas about the stock market show he lacks even *basic* ECON 101 knowledge. For starters, if anyone had a super-giga computer that could predict the stock market, other super-giga computers would have to take the predictions of the every other giga-computer into account.
Giga-computers can no more predict the combined result of all other traders using giga-computers than a computer can predict whether or not, in general, an algorithm will halt. And this ignores the other confounding issues, like human fallibility, greed, random events, and impect information.
For an analysis of the real world, stay away from Sterling. Peter Huber has made a much better analogy of market volatility based on the laws of physics.
Volatility and the Laws of Physics Quoting Huber: Financial instability isn't going to abate, it's going to get worse--for companies, industries and nations. That conclusion, I modestly submit, derives from the laws of physics. Nonetheless, the diversified investor who can stomach financial turbulence will prosper as never before.
Fact number one: liquidity. The wired PC and the Web behind it have made it very easy and cheap to move wealth around. Interfaces between investors and global markets have been reduced to clicks on a screen. Brokerage fees have fallen 90% recently, and they're going to fall 90% more. To put it in terms of physics, the viscosity is being removed from the financial system. Yesterday's financial molasses now flows like water.
Fact number two: momentum. More wealth is moving ever faster through the global financial pipeline. This is partly because many political and regulatory impediments have been eliminated, and partly because--recent troubles notwithstanding--there is more wealth to move.
As viscosity falls and momentum rises, fluid flows make a transition from stable to unstable. Water in your kitchen faucet transitions from laminar to turbulent when you twist the tap all the way open. Same with all fluids that move through, over or around pipes, ducts, propellers and wings. Waves, oscillations and shocks all multiply when more mass flows faster with less friction. Honey trickles slowly and quietly; fast-flowing water and air often babble, moan, whistle and shriek. Circuit breakers and rules that limit program trading are the financial regulators' misguided attempt to put baffles and mufflers back into pipes that have lost all the old kind of friction.
By the way, Huber makes clear arguments that destroy the naive environmentalism (ala Viridians) that most greens subscribe, of course, no green would dare read this: http://www.marshall.org/huberroundtable .htm.
there will always be stupid people running them
Incorrect, in this case. The beauty of the market system is that the control of the money tends toward those who are most capable of managing it. If you had to answer the question, "who is better at predicting the market than anyone else?", what would you answer? You'd probably end up with something like mutual fund managers, or day traders, or something like that. See, people who are bad at predicting the market bet wrong, and increase fluctuations (e.g. they buy when something is high, driving it yet higher). But these people don't make money. They soon lose the money they have, and people won't give them more. People who are good at predicting the market bet correctly, and decrease fluctuations (buy when low, make less low; sell when high, make less high).
So, the market process will tend toward the situation where:
Investment capital is controlled by people who are good at managing investment capital.
This doesn't mean that people who aren't that good at managing money won't have money, only that they will leave it to the experts. And the experts know enough to higher the people who know enough to make the computers give good answers.
Of course, I may have a slightly distorted view of things, since my dream job would be using adaptive artificial intelligence techniques like genetic algorithms to do economic modelling. Not (only) for the money, but because it's an intesting problem.
BTW, I would guess that economic modelling is about half way between the complexity of modelling the entire solar system, and that of modelling the earths weather. The first can be done to a reasonable accuracy with hand calculation. The latter is probably on the order of 10 times more calculations & measurements to be able to extend the forecast one more day. Economic modelling could be done well enough to make a lot of money on current supercomputers, if you knew a good algorithm (which no one does yet). I mean, people can estimate, but it's a lot like giving someone a table listing the locations of all the object in the solar system, not telling them what anything was (like not even saying that the numbers represent positions), and then asking for the next set of numbers. Once you know the laws behind it, it's easy to do, even though the system is actually chaotic.
--Kevin
Did anyone thinking this article is slamming capitalism stop to think about the things that were dropped in that article prety subltly? For instance, when he says all children are taught probability theory and there are no breakout stocks and no one imagines they can beat the market, there is no greed, etc. This to me sounds like a call FOR capitalism. If a company wants to be greedy and make tons of money, they have to serve the customers above and beyond their competitors, if there is no greed, why would someone make a better computer?
Next he mentions the globo. He says it reduced currency fluctuations and such. Have you ever considered a global currency in an eceonomic aspect? Say the economy in Uganda takes a big dive - all the currency in the entire world takes a devaluation. Disasters are distributed to the entire world. So are booms, so if a country starts doing fantabulous, the country doesn't grow at all, the value of the currency just goes up a few bits. And considering how often a huge boom comes along compared to how often disasters hit all over the globe, this is a bad situation.
When he says that people have forgotten about alternatives to capitalism and the like, I wonder if he realizes that the world he depicts is already devoid of capitalism. I don't have any idea what it would be called, its certainly not any Marxist offshoot or anything like that, but it's missing all of the key features of capitalism. He already stated that there is no free market because everything is controlled and there can be no breakout products and no market fluctuations, greed, or competition.
The rest of the article is basically a blowup of an old dystopian view of any given future that all the good stuff has already been invented and in the future everything will just be more of the same. All the new technology he describes is boring and pase. I find it hard to believe that this would happen this close in the future. Do you still get jazzed when you see that in a couple years your computer is going to be 10x faster than it is now? Of course! And if you hear in 2 years that your compter is going to be 20x faster in another 2 years, you're still going to get jazzed. You're not going to get bored with it.
There is a human condition that I think is ignored or viewed as nonexistant here. That is the desire to see great works doen by other humans and perhaps even the innate desire to do great things and show them to other people. There was never a point in history when this was not alive and well. It is not simply that humans wish to improve the condition of their life, they wish to see achievements. Maybe its some evolutionary device or something, but I definitely see it.
Esperandi
Is there an obscure economic model similar to the one this article says capitalism turned into?
"One base efficiency--really, the major efficiency stressed by pure capitalism is the maximization of pure monetary profit in the foreseeable future. So in the case of MythicalCorp, Inc., if it's possible to save a buck by spewing pollutants into your local river, it's most efficient to do so!"
Would it still be efficient to do so if the owner of the river could sue you royally? Of course not. What about if the owner of the river specifically did not let you have access to the river in addition to suing? Wel, you'd have to do smething else. I think the owners of the environments being harmed should be responsible for protecting them, but it's al handed off the EPA. It's too big of a job for the EPA to regulate it down, but if the property owners are doing it, it might turn out better.
And the point about it being in the corporations best interest to preserve the enviroment cannot be discounted simply because there are a few stupid corporations that don't deserve it...
Esperandi
Well, i think he might have considered the nanotech issue actually. Why wasn't it prominent and mentioned? Well, simple, it's sorta like the observation you made about the 16th century guy seeing the 20th.
Currently, people see the rate of progress speeding up and see no sign of it stopping. If you're going on this assumption and thinking of the future, what are you going to surmise? That progress will get so fast and IMPOSSIBLE to follow that people just will not care any more, or even be able to care.
Ahh, but he's wrong and you're right. This can never happen. Why? Because it takes longer to develop something new than it does to learn to use something new. It takes years to invent a car, minutes to learn how to drive it. Took generations to get a working computer out and a few weeks to learn (going by the original ones, now the learning curve is smaller - so is the production cycle).
If we ever get to a point where it would be technically possible to break this barrier, it will be avoided. The scenario I'm thinking of is something like 90 companies all making radically different computers. I mean, different architectures, different user interfaces (I mean DIFFERENT in the sense that Linux, Windows, MacOS, and all those are all the same... I mean like one is traditional, based on graphical windows on a monitor, the other is based on a heat pattern on the back of your hand, THAT different). If they're all developing at the same time, increasing their development curve and producing radically different products not only from each other but from their previous products... now, this of course is never ever going to happen. Why would the companies want it to? Even if the market was split exactly evenly to each company, capitalism (and it has to be capitalism) will drive one company to reduce the learning cycle below the development cycle. To do that, they'd have to do things like backwards compatibility, etc, etc.
So I don't worry about progress getting so fast that we sit back complacent and watch the big commercials for things without wonder. Also, Bruce kinda smashed his own dick in the door on that. Why would there be commercials if no one cared about them or even moreso, if people had the view that a breakout product was impossible?
Esperandi
Well, as soon as one of the countries goes into an economic nosedive and drives the currency of the entire EU into the toilet along with it, I have a feeling we'll see an end to this kind of nonsense...
Esperandi
What if the dollar had shared the decline of the yen in that japanese crash recently? People would not be happy about that kind of stuff...
Wow, a global currency might make warfare a zero-sum game with nothing to lose on either side, at least currency-wise... think bout it.
If that stream doesn't flow across anyone elses land, into another body of water, etc, why shuld I do anything? It is hurting me and only me.
As for the companies banding together and buying most of the Mississippi system, if the consumers are happy with how that affects the world, let them. If they're not hurting anyone in the immediate time and neither the corporations nor the consumers (who are the only thing keeping them alive - no business in the world can survive for long with 0 customers) care what happens down the line in the future - they deserve to be screwed in 10 years when they get cancer, etc. Hey, you make bad decisions, you have bad things happen to you. It's reality.
And contrary to popular belief, humans are animals. Everything we do it part of nature. Every bit of sludge we spill, every species that we extinct is just as natural as a lion hunting down an antelope in the serenghetti.
Esperandi
It is the fault of consumers and consumers alone if they are too wimpy to make hard choices in life to stand up for their principles. If my electric bill goes up to $800/mo I will live in the dark. I will not complain and whine and ask the government to use its guns to protect me. If I find out that the people I always buy my computer products from is a rascist company - I will not buy from them any more. Even if that means paying more, getting worse service,, etc, etc. I weigh those choices and I make them. And I live by them. I live my life.
As for your retort about the stream that doesn't go into anyone elses property, you were the one who proposed it! I had already told you that if it affected anyone else a lawsuit would ensue. Were you simply re-asking the question? The answer is still the same. And a river delta would probably have the most powerful representative group of owners around.. people using it as a sea route, fisherman, tourism boards, hotels on the oceanfront, etc, etc. The company that polluted that would probably go out of business after they got smacked with that lawsuit.
Esperandi
Sure, but to get you started, get a dictionary or search the web for things like "real estate" and "private property". Private property is nice concept invented by capitalists to describe when you can buy something and then you control it and don't have to share it if you don't want to.
And I'm not recommending private individual ownership of rivers, a logical owner of a river might be a county or a state, "regulated" by an elected group of representatives, keeping with the american system of government.
Esperandi
The county that the river runs through owns that section of the river. If theres a spill like you hypothesize happens, the county it starts in brings action against the offender for negligence with all of the other counties/private land owners/businesspeople (fisherman would obviously be affected) and they have a big old class action lawsuit, or they pursue it individually if they wish. If it flows into another country, that's irrelevant. We can't tell that country to eliminate their version of the EPA and go to an ownership and responsibility system. Unless it was a TREMENDOUS spill and it was very close to the border, chances are that their EPA would have to ingore the spill because paying it any attention would detract from their bigger problems. For instance, if someone pours a couple of buckets of paint or oil or something else hazardous into a small creek on my property, the EPA won't be willing to do anything about it. If the county or city owned it and I complained, they more likely would be willing to act on it. When it flows into another owners property, liability increases.
The point here is to make polluting as unattractive as possible, remember. Right now the game is to pollute but stay small enough so the squakier wheels are getting the grease, in this system it would be more like if you pollute, you get nailed. Local places can set much stricter pollution standards if they vote to do so. But, what if a city at the mouth of, say, the delta of the Mississippi sets their pollution regs very tight while people north of them have them much more lax? Well, if you're a company planning on polluting, you're going to have to consider that down the road...
Esperandi
Under this system it would also be possible to simply not allow the incoming probable polluters to even setup shop as well.
I hate to say it...but it is time to drag out the
old clue bat.
> Well, for starters, this guy is obviously
> speaking in such vague generalities that we can
> neither prove nor disprove his vision of the
> future.
Even if he said exactly that "on this date AT&T
stock will fall to X" you still can't prove or
disprove it until that date comes.
You simply can not possibly "prove or disprove"
furtue events, until that day comes. The best you
can do is talk abou tprobability of it happening.
> Never trust anyone who claims they can see the
> future and have all the answers. I prefer to
> function as intelligently as I can in the
> present as well as the future, and I at least
> know enough to state that I don't know it all.
> IMHO, this guy is a fraud.
He is a fraud? Please point me to where it is
stated that this article is anything but fiction?
Is douglass adams a "Fraud" because he wrote about
the earth being destroyed by a Vogon Constructor
fleet, who were making a hyberspace bypass?
The article was merely a fictional acount of what
the author sees as a possible future. The intent
of fictional acounts of this type is NOT to
accuratly predict the future...rather...it is
(usually) to present a world which we can hold
up and compare to our own (in this case a world
that has been ravaged by the lack of forethought
of our own world). The purpose is to make people
think about the world that they live in now and
to reflect on current day values and trends.
I fail to see how this is fraud.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> By cultural cycle I refer to the lower class
> citizens (or whatever they were referred to at
> anypoint in time) coming out of the shadows to
> smack around the powerful every 30 or 40 years.
> In the early 1900's there was the labor
> movement, in the 50's and 60's we had civil and
> social movements. In general these things lead
> to a better society, even if it wasn't
> revolutionary. The time may be coming again soon
The more I think about it...the more I am apt to
agree with you...however its not exactly the lower
class comming out and beating the upper class.
These changes seem to start in the upper class.
(not the top of the upper class...more the
middle of the upper class). People who would be
considered philosophers or thinkers....who
disagree with the current system fundamentally.
Look at the "Labor Movement". The upper class were
abusing the lower class. People worked long hours
for shit money. Working conditions were dangerous.
There were little or no protections for workers.
The labor movement, unions etc, grew out of
socialist and communist ideas. Those ideas however
came from men like Karl Marx.
Who was Marx? Son of a Lawyer. Educated in law
and philosophy. He was no low class worker. He
was a social philosopher. It was the ideas of men
like Marx, Engles and several others that helped
oranize and galvanize the lower class.
Face it, the average lower class worker does not
want to analyse and think about larger issues
like economics or social justice etc. Why do
you think television is so popular? After a
hard days work, people just want to sit down and
turn their mind off. (I admit...after a stressfull
day - I sometimes do the same - luckily I don't
have too many stressful days)
However...once enough members of the upper class
(again not usually the top people...as they tend
to have too much vested in the status quo) are
disenchanted with the way things are...then things
start to happen.
One of the reasons that I see republican democracy
as so dangerous is that it attempts to short
circuit this cycle of social progress. (yes, now
I am digressing). It sets up a small and powerful
elite, who are chosen by their wealth (afterall
it takes real money to run a campaign and get
elected to a high level of power) and ability
to persuede people.
The cheif effect of this is to make the people
think they have power because they have choice.
In truth the power is still with the main power
groups because they are the ones that choose what
the peoples choices are. In the end the system
caters to the rich and powerfull, while it
pacifies the general populace.
All they need to do is ocasionally make an issue
of something, then take decisive action on it. In
essence, throw the people a bone. Make them feel
important.
Then again...I wouldn't doubt that marx said
similar things about the bougeois. As much as
I think the system is setup to short circuit
that social cycle, I still feel that things ARE
changing despite it.
Then again...thats not surprizing...one only
need aply some of the basic Erisian principals
to it....remembering that anything which attempts
to impose order, in the end results in more
disorder. Perhaps the worst "they" can do is
slow the cycle down like a poorly constucted dam
and someday it will just explode with more
force then before?
hmmm... time will tell I supose.
ok...I have rambled enough.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I find it ironic when people say shooting lawyers will help. It is the law that keeps us one step ahead of pure barbarism, and the law cannot function without its servants. Now, a case could be better made, I think, to call for more lawyers for regular folks, and less lawyers for transnational corporations. The latter are primarily engaged in the ritual practice of involuntary paper burial, anyway, to no great benefit for society.
I am not a lawyer.
Wonder what he meant by that. Did he mean unemployment? Accidental deaths? Failed corporations?
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
What about a bicycle? Surely you don't think that bicycles are caused by company performace -- that would be a very odd coincidence.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
And he's trollin the stairway to karma
And when he gets there he knows if the posts are all flames
With a troll he can get what he came for
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And he's trollin the stairway to karma
There's a +5 on the post but he wants to be sure
And you know sometimes threads have two moderatorsBR> In the post by the top there's a karma whore who sings
Sometimes all of our posts are for Linus Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And he's trollin the stairway to karma
There's a +2 I get when I flame with the rest
the fear that Jon Katz may be leaving
In these threads I have seen karma whores form a ring
And the voices of those who stand moderated Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And he's trollin the stairway to karma
And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune
Then the zealots will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the thread will echo with laughter And it makes me wonder If there's a minus one in your future
Don't be alarmed now
It's just a dump points for the moderater
Yes there are two paths you can go by
but in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on Your thread is humming and it won't go because you don't know
The taco's calling you to join him
Dear poster can't you hear the wind blow and did you know
Your stairway lies on the honest thread
And as we wind on down the thread
Our karma taller than our souls
There walks a poster we all know
Who shines insight and wants to show
How everything he posts turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The post will come to you at last
When all are whores and whores is all
To be a flamer and a troll
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And he's trollin the stairway to karma
There's a poster who's sure all that's +3 is gold
And he's trollin the stairway to karma
And when he gets there he knows if the posts are all flames
With a troll he can get what he came for
And he's trollin the stairway to karma.
.
Take all good things in moderation, including moderation.
We see some of this already - Yahoo has eliminated its portal competition, EBay has pretty much sewn up auctions, and AOL rules everything in between.
As it stands, it should be quite obvious that VA Linux will certainly be worth less than $1 billion within twelve months. If you own this stock, use your brain and cut your losses right now.
Look at the charts for most .coms - they're already in bear territory.
But like its physical analog of a rock dropped in a stream, this cultural pattern unfortunately also has a trend of getting weaker with time. The cultural wave trend exists wholly within the context of the initial splash. The power of the waves must weaken otherwise every 30 or 40 years we'd have another War of Independance.
Its running down, slowly. Even if this perceived pattern is real, it will eventually smooth out to near imperceptable levels. I feel we are almost there as we speak. What exactly did the 60 give us? Miniskirts and Happy Faces and Bob Dylan? Perhaps the best thing we gained out of the sixties is a general awareness of the abuses of power, or perhaps we knew it all along. What concrete changes were made back then? And what about now? Grassroots organizations today, although numerous and determined, accomplish small things on small scales. Why? Because as we have grown, so have the powers that be. We have more resources and yet so do they. Rest assured that any change we enact is more than negated in some other area outside our influence or off the radar. Short of another revolution, this wave pattern tha began with the American Revolution is almost imperceptable.
Now we must also consider this: there is nowhere else to run to. Back in the heyday of English Colonialism, the early settlers found it relatively easy to populate and organize the North American continent and eventually seperate from the mother country. But the disenfranchised today have no such luxury. The global population is too great and the landmass too limited to support any major exodus. And we wont stop breeding. There exists nowhere on Earth today that can be to us what North America was to the settlers back then. So we are left with the waning cultural wave patterns, visible today in the same way that the the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang is visible with a sensitive telescope.
As a people, we have nowhere else to go and nothing new to see. At this point, the human race is almost like a bunch of rats in a covered box, and breeding. We feed on ourselves. All this brou ha ha about the market and a global currency is just another new rat for us to turn to for answers, but in the end its just another rat. Bruce Stering can predict what he wants about the market. I predict that if we don't find a way get off this planet, and soon, we will become rats in a box on a sinking ship.
-Jason
NEW YORK -- The Internet's biggest bull just turned into a big bear. Merrill Lynch's Henry Blodget became one of Wall Street's best-known analysts by making outlandish predictions about Internet stocks.
For example, Blodget forecast that Amazon.com's stock could hit a price of $400 at a time when it was only trading for only $240 per share.
But yesterday, Blodget changed his tune, predicting that the vast majority of Internet companies will be bankrupt within five years.
Of all Internet companies, "75 percent will disappear within five years, and 75 percent will never make money, or sell themselves," Blodget said at the Silicon Alley 2000 Internet conference.
He declined, however, to predict which companies would survive and which would die.
For investors, Blodget advised a scattershot approach to investing in the Internet sector, in hopes that one or two "home runs" would provide enough gains to offset losses from the other holdings.
But he also warned that newcomers to Internet investing may be too late, comparing the phenomenon to the Gold Rush of the 1800s.
"Ultimately, the real latecomers find they are buying piles of dirt," he said.
He said that since 1995, the industry has grown from one Internet company, America Online, with a total market value of $1 billion, to more than 300 companies with market capitalization of $1 trillion. But looking into the next five to 10 years, Blodget expects the flow of capital to slow.
Those bearish comments were taken to heart by shareholders in Internet stocks, most of which moved lower yesterday.
The Nasdaq composite index, where many Internet stocks trade, fell 29.57 to 4,754.51, its first down day this week.
But Blodget reserved some of his speech to make bullish comments on a select handful of Internet stocks, which responded by rallying in a big way.
Blodget said, for example, that there's good value in wireless, business-to-business and Internet infrastructure stocks such as Ariba Inc., which rocketed $19.81 to $299.69, and Infospace.com, which traded up $23.06 to $261.06. All stock quotes are as of the 4 p.m. close.
As for Doubleclick, which has experienced a selloff in recent weeks on worries that it improperly gathered information about its customers, Blodget thinks it's undervalued.
"I think the privacy concerns will pass at Doubleclick," he said.
Doubleclick gained $2.88 to $83.44 yesterday.
We have more leisure that people did in 1900. I'm not claiming nothing has changed. I am claiming that the luxury each generation imagines will follow on the heels of "the next big thing" always turns out to be a mirage.
We have slightly more income equality than they did. At least 3/4 of the people in the bottom quitile of American income remain there for at least 20 years. No one has done longer range studies than that for lack of data. The study you are refering to discussed the bottom 20% of income tax payers, and even it seriously massaged the data to get that result. Class mobility is less than it was in 1950. It wasn't a BLS study, it was a conservative think tank - I can't remember which - that paid for it.
Today's poor own cars, and in 1900 the poor owned hundreds of acres of farmland. They had razors and ovens, which they didn't have in 1800. They were still poor, and so are today's poor. Poverty is measured in avoidable misery, not misery against an absolute standard.
There hasn't been any significant increase in public health in the US since 1980. There has been since 1900, but since the vaccination era, we have also failed to kill off polio (which we could have done), started to see a resurgence of TB, discovered whole new classes of bugs never known to exist and for which we have no treatment. A utopia of health is still in the future. As late as 1960, many people imagined that by 2000, we would be winning against the bugs.
No, misery ain't what it used to be, but the optimists of 1900 were way off the mark. We still live in a world of avoidable misery. That is the failure of the technological utopianism of 1900, and it shows every sign of becoming the failure of technological utopianists today.
This sounds like the result of what Chesterson talked about. A sort of cult of progress.
<br>
I guess life sux if all you live for is the next innovation and have no internal ability to fufill the human desire of a meaningful life.<br>
Creed
who has to blow up one of those 'inflatable cities' - an air mattress is bad enough.
I guess pins are illegal in there, too.
C'ya!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Other people have already commented on just about every other aspect of this story (some rather well, some not quite so), so I'll restrict myself to the technological aspect.
:)
Basically, I think Bruce is being naive. He's seriously and dangerously underestimating the impact that dirt-cheap molecular nanotechnology may have in the future society. Quite honestly, I just don't understand why - I mean, I understand the skepticism (it's very fashionable nowadays), but this is the kind of thing that just changes everything - everything - and it is coming, hopefully within 20 years. Just as people from the 16th century would be overwhelmed at the rate at which things happen in the 20th century, the nanotech revolution is likely to knock at the 20th century man's door before he even knew what happened. And then Bruce will kick himself for having been pessimistic about technology (which is definitely a rookie mistake, as Mr Clarke will tell you). And then I'll have my revenge. MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Well, that's all the ranting I have for now
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
In the afterword to Earth, David Brin talks at length about how difficult it is to predict the medium-term future --- it has to be both plausible and surprising (who in 1960 would not have been surprised by the world of 2000?). This is a hard thing to do; the two requirements almost contradict one another. That said, Sterling's piece isn't a bad job of it. No, of course the world won't be exactly as he describes it --- but there are elements of it which could happen, more easily than we think. The bit about fatigue, in particular, is believable; just as increased knowledge about all of the truly horrible things that happen in the world led us, as a culture, to be tired of trying to fix them (there's a large set of literature on what social scientists describe as "compassion fatigue"), constantly chasing after the cool, new technology will lead us to "technology fatigue": the excitement will dwindle. More importantly, he's asking a very relevant question: in a world where the value of everything is defined by marketing, and everyone knows it, how is it possible for anything to have value or be intrinsically important at all? If everything is marketing, what matters? Unlike Sterling, I think that society as a whole will react by retreating into religion. But there will be some sectors that don't --- and while Sterling essentially points to despair as the solution that will emerge, it might be interesting to speculate about what, eventually, would replace such despair.
I suspect Sterling knows this. There are certainly reams of "predictions" in SF that are laughable now. But as you say, it is a mistake to assume that true prediction is the point of SF. Really, there are three sorts of SF "predictions".
- Descriptions of things that the author thinks will happen.
- Descriptions of things that the author worries might happen if things don't change, or change in a bad way.
- Descriptions of ideas that the author thinks are interesting, but not necessarily at all likely.
And of course most stories are mostly a melding of the three. It might be interesting the speculate on which this essay is.I suspect that it isn't meant to describe "what will happen" so much as it is meant simply to say "what goes up must come down" in regards to the economy.
The cake is a pie
OK, it's damn hard to predict the future. In fact, its pretty much impossible, anyone who predicts anything correctly has a lot of luck on their side.
So Bruce seems to be extrapolating our current cultural makeup: a cynical and increasingly hopeless and pessemistic society. And as such, while the world sucks and is boring, as he puts in a more elegant fashion, there isn't anything we can do about it.
I like his comments on the business cycle, but he seems to beleive that there isn't a "cultural cycle" as well. I haven't read any of his books (I will soon though, everyone bugs me about reading his books), but my limited studies of history have shown me that there is a cultural cycle as well.
By cultural cycle I refer to the lower class citizens (or whatever they were referred to at any point in time) coming out of the shadows to smack around the powerful every 30 or 40 years. In the early 1900's there was the labor movement, in the 50's and 60's we had civil and social movements. In general these things lead to a better society, even if it wasn't revolutionary. The time may be coming again soon.
Everytime the powerful try to roll back people's rights, things reach a breaking point where these movements seem to happen. People never lose all hope as Bruce seems to suggest. You can't have something without it's opposite being present as well. It's cyclical just like anything else.
That being said I'd have to label Bruce's article as "trendy" more than "insighful". Still, it was a good read.
I think we can more or less take it as a given that whatever the world is like in 2035, it won't be much like this story, for the same reason the 1990s weren't like any of the old SF stories that tried to imagine them. I re-read some old Larry Niven stories recently; he speculated (probably not too seriously) that the '90s would have manned visits to Pluto and cheap commercial teleportation, but computers don't figure much more into his 1960s vision of the '90s than they did in the real life of the '60s. (Which is precisely the point, I guess; writers tend to imagine the future as being sort of like today except for one or two specific, isolated changes, which isn't how the real world works.)
In a way, what a lot of SF is really about isn't the future, but more how these isolated changes that writers imagine might affect us if we had them today. This story, though, is more like a satire on the present (the joke about companies lasting only 18 months reminded me of Netscape, which lasted somewhat longer than that but was so clearly doomed from the beginning that I never saw the point of its existence other than as a typical Jim Clark get-richer-quick stock scam). As such it's mildly amusing, but it doesn't really say anything new.
I'm supprised he didn't mention the copyright wars, perhaps it's because he's in denial considering that he just wrote a copyrighted work. Mp3, DVD are only going to escalate. They've spent over a trillion dollars betting that copyrights are a basic right, and noone's going to take it lying down when it turns out that they're not. Of course no one thought they would be willing to suffer and make so much violence over slavery as a false property right a century or so before that. Poor souls, I guess they didn't realise that people were willing to be violent in the name of protecting copyrights.
Mr. Sterling seems to misunderstand why fluctuations in the market exist. His analysis seems to imply that flucuations are present only because we don't understand the market. This is not true. While it is the case that buying behavior in the market is controlled to a certain extent by people's perception of the economy, that perception is rooted fundamentally in performance of corporations. If companies are doing well, making good decisions, and producing efficiently, the economy is strong. On the other hand, if companies make bad decisions and subpar products, the economy does poorly. We can analyze the market all we want, but just because we might understand how it works does not mean that all companies will perform equally well all the time. Some companies perform well, some poorly, and the sum total of performance is the single biggest control on market behavior.
I can whine in general unspecific terms about capitalism too. If I go several pages will "Fortune" publish me? I can whine about people smoking and drinking and having unprotected sex too. Like Mr. Sterling I'm not having enough sex (unprotected or otherwise) and I resent those who appear to be enjoying life more than I am.
The environmental rants were nice too. Think about this: environmentalism is all about eliminating waste, buisness profitability is also about eliminating waste. Capitalism does not == environmental havoc. The problem is that companies and individuals are shielded from having to bear the cost of their inneficiency thanks to the government subsidizing polluting activities.
Enough of this, I'm off to eliminate some waste. (unlike Mr. Sterling I do this in the restroom instead of a magazine article)
--Shoeboy
> Sure, we can pile super-giga computers on the market, analyzing it over and over again, but the main fluctuations will always be there, because of one fact: no matter how powerful the computers, there will always be stupid people running them
A second fact -- or so I suppose it to be -- is that some kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle must surely apply. If you find a scheme that predicts the market perfectly, you start winning consistently. But if you win consistently, someone else has to lose consistently. Ergo, you have changed the market. The other players will either change their strategy or else quit playing. On the other hand, if everyone adopts your scheme, the result would be the ad absurdum situation where everyone wins all the time; surely the market cannot function in such a fashion.
I suppose one possible result is the highly predictible and well behaved market he describes, but I rather suspect that the actual result would be a market that always slipped from under your thumb just as you thought you had it pinned down, leaving the appearance of being even more erratic than before.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If I remember correctly from my class on the Environment and the Human Impact, we are adding 1 billion more people to the planet roughly every 12 years at the current rate.
That means by 2035, if growth continues at its current rate, there will be about 8.92 billion people on Earth.
Wow. All I can say is "good luck" to humanity.
Interesting, but my reaction to the author's description of the market in the future seems suspect. Sure, we can pile super-giga computers on the market, analyzing it over and over again, but the main fluctuations will always be there, because of one fact: no matter how powerful the computers, there will always be stupid people running them. GIGO. You can't compensate for human stupidity in any system. There will always be that the market will behave in unpredictable ways - completely chaotically.
"The world doesn't really need more busy people, maybe not even more intelligent people. It needs 'deep people'..."