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.'"

Comments

Is this a private party or can anyone play.

[Shoeboy]

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

Re:market fallacies

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

--

7.4 billion? Not at current growth rates.

[blackwizard]

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.

market fallacies

[aarestad]

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.