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A Case For the Necessity of Science Fiction
unc0nn3ct3d writes "This article makes an interesting point about the necessity of science fiction — or, more specifically, speculative fiction as a tool to aid in the long-term survival of the human species. 'We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change we are experiencing. Our world is changing so fast now that we often don't have time to contemplate the full ramifications that come with the increasingly rapid adoption of new technologies and social changes. Most often this is simply because these changes are being introduced almost one after another after another, without any time to breathe. Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise.'"
And then, we get all frightened and refuse to build large-scale particle colliders because we're afraid that black hole monsters will crawl out from under our beds and suck us into the fifth dimension.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I find in talking with my wife and other friends/family who are not SciFi readers that they are often surprised by certain events in the news. Whereas I will say something like, "Oh, this reminds me of Snow Crash, or Left Hand of Darkness ... kewl!"
Good quality, 'what if'-style SciFi keeps your world view more flexible than reading most any other kind of genre.
Only on Slashdot will you find an article saying we need more science fiction as news.
who was that author again who wrote: "from stone axe to copper sword"...?
Engineers and scientists will invent things anyway regardless of whether there has been bad fiction written about the concept beforehand.
We do need to speed up social conventions to match the speed of technology. For example part of the unemployment crises that we are now seeing is due to technology displacing workers. Whet people don't seem to grasp is that there is a very serious intention to replace all labor with machines. Education and shifting from job skill to job skills will not be enough to keep afloat soon. Yet when social scientists try to offer solutions they are seen as crackpots and lunatics. Frankly some of their solutions make a lot of sense.
However there are some basic issues that never resolved before robotics and the like advanced and one wonders what will happen if robotics is able to solve them. For example robots designed to remove dents and to paint cars might be able to keep every car looking new. But sense we were never able to do that before robotics what will be the economic effect of doing it. The same is true of house and lawn work. Good roofs and fresh paint on a sharp looking lawn without human effort would be a shocker. But what does that do to an economy. We don't even know if humans should be involved in an economy or whether we best let robots and computers serve us all things that we need.
Cave paintings and sand drawings have been speculating on what tomorrow's hunt may have been like. Religion has been speculating on what may happen after death. Man has always been speculating on the future and that is why we are here now in full survival mode.
And the rate of change may possibly be historic, but the sum of relative change during the agricultural revolution must have been greater considering the lack of cultural base and breath of historical knowledge and technology that we have today.
Most people are STUPID!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
The world is pretty much the same as when I entered it, except now everyone has a cellphone.
3-D Wookie porn featuring Chewbacca doing Princess Leia........
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I don't think there is much in the current world to surprise you, if you've read John Brunners The Shockwave Rider. The biggest surprise is when you look at the time it was published: 1975. It has always astounded me, how clearly Johns eyes have seen....
There are so many good quotes in that book, that you could make nearly a second book out of them. My favorite: There are two kinds of fools: One says, "This is old therefore it is good." The other one says, "This is new therefore it is better."
I think the thesis "Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise" is correct. At least i can say it worked for me.
CU, Martin
It seems to me that this effect is very similar to the existence of a vacuum in the center of an explosion.
Education and shifting from job skill to job skills will not be enough to keep afloat soon.
everybody go up the food chain to stay employed - i.e. get more education. The thing is, not everyone is cut out for higher education or education in disciplines that are in demand. And they never mention the part of supply of said educated workers outstripping demand.
So, the stupid people sit around and collect a check from the Government?
Does anyone even know what the word "exponential" means anymore??
... but if I don't read a SF book for three days I start going mad. For some people escapism is very important for staying sane - even Tolkien recognised that:
"Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Really, there have always been people who are unable or unwilling to deal with change. It's nothing new and it certainly isn't getting worse with time. 100 years ago some individuals were having a tough time dealing with the idea of mass population moving to the new fangled "factories" (or as they were originally called: manufactories) and leaving the farming life behind. 50 years ago some people were having a hard time coming to terms with the social changes hitting society - lack of respect, sexual freedom and all this rock-n-roll.
So no, I don't buy the basic premise and I certainly disagree with the idea that the people who are insecure about change will want to read books about even more change.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I basically agree that science fiction can help forearm us for making reasonable decisions, but think there's a danger of people swallowing authors' interpretations of what the effects of different developments might entail whole. Roy Blount reports that a man was once asked if he '...believed in infant babtism', and he responded 'Believe it? I've seen it done!' Though we can tell reality from fantasy (and science fiction...incorporating the worlds of if), some works can make impressions to the point that people treat them as if they were evidence.
This can range from a shrill 'Any altruist or collectivist government action will lead to disaster---I saw that happen in Atlas Shrugged!' to a smug 'All giant corporations are evil---I saw that in every sci-fi movie from 1970 onward,' to an arse-hurt 'Charles Stross is wrong when he says that space colonisation is probably impractical---I've seen it happen in 99% of the books I've read since the age of 8.' Again, the problem is that within a book the author has control not only of what arguments are presented, but of who presents them (either the estimable Wesley Mouch or that obnoxious and long-winded Galt/Ananconda/Swaggart crowd) and what happens when one idea or another is put into practice (think of a notional authors' fictional contention that a Marxist revolution---a Marxist one, mind you---would be followed massive State Capitalism, suppression of workers' rights, and the like).
I think this is a particular danger in a society where 1.) so many religious fanatics insist that their children be taught that one particular book's premises, observations, and conclusions must be treated as infallible, and also 2.) many science fiction fans think, 'I'm so much more clever than those religious fanatics, I'd never be that gullible,' which is one of the stigmata of a mark. Newt Gingrich, Cory Doctorow, and that woman in the Dorsai merc outfit at that Westercon who apparently jills-off to the thought of our getting Starship Trooper's political system all come to mind.
Summarized the article just says, "SF is good because it helps us think about stuff -- but not that icky lowbrow SF like Star Trek; that's practically porn."
That's not a fair distinction. The author dismisses Trek, which in the 60s had some ham-fisted attempts at an Important Message (mainly re: race), and puts "Avatar" in that category even though it has a (stupid, hypocritical) moral message too. So it's not having A Message that makes for the kind of SF the author likes. The article's more like a guide to making movies that will get whipped in profits by the latest Star Trek. For good or ill, I hear some people were deeply affected by "Avatar", so that sort of movie is capable of being deep and meaningful in some people's eyes.
I wrote an SF novel recently. There was supposed to be a Message in it. I'd read enough SF to know that making the Important Message blatant and heavy-handed is a way to ruin an otherwise decent story; famous example "Atlas Shrugged". What I found to be a good solution is to focus on being entertaining first, with plot and character being much more important than the Deep Philosophical Implications. The same group of characters could've been used to tell a story with a different message, if the character development had gone a different way ("This cause isn't worth killing over!"), and that's a good thing.
So, if anyone wants to apply the article's advice, they should interpret it as, "Write stories with meaningful takes on the possible future -- but they should be stories first."
(One bit of snootiness: I've got a theory that a way to describe character growth is a two-axis method. One axis is, "Can the hero find the strength to do what he's trying to do?" and the other, harder-to-write one is, "Is the hero questioning what he should do?" Simpler stories tend not to bother much with the second one, but overusing it gets angsty and annoying quickly.)
Revive the Constitution.
You can keep up on the latest trends in who Marsha might be attracted to besides Curtis! And is the Jennifer's baby actually Devon's? And will Steve ever come out of that coma, and if he does, what will happen to June and Chris?
It will be the middle 80% and they will win. Society will devolve and human-kind will come to an end.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Reminds me of a much earlier article by Athena Andreadis: http://www.starshipreckless.com/stories/archives/The%20Double%20Helix.pdf The Wired article's author is listed as 'admin'.... wonder if admin has read any of Athena's articles... Of course, there is nothing new. No doubt many have penned similar sentiments before. I'd take a slightly different tack and suggest that imaginative work in any realm is not only essential, but part of the human construct. We thrive on extending our possibilities through thought experiment. We stagnate when the imagination fails.
We have a fairly plastic period of development that ends in a sort of hormonal fixative we call puberty. Puberty is often interwoven with plastic fantastic lovers, and secret penchants to transform into telekinetic vampires and such. For some it's hell for others, like me, it's something to be clung onto long past adolescence. Science fiction, more so fantasy, can cater to pubescent transmogrification, but can also function as a trail breaking exercise for societies. Still the mind, as an American neuroscientist put it, is just the brain doing it's job and it goes about it's job with the same stringent constraints, barring illness, that the rest of a somewhat healthy body does. From almost a preschool age we generally demonstrate the ability to acquire language, even two, three or more languages, at a seemingly unnatural rate. Once the window for acquiring languages closes around the early teens, acquiring even one's native language can be difficult and curtailed.
From the above jumble two quick points tumble free. One is that the plasticity of our minds has constraints, some of those constraints are developmental and thus temporally constrained. The other is that once the most plastic state of our development closes anything we acquire afterward is by dint of rote and reason and, for all that, will probably carry with it the hallmarks of our native environment from early development. We talk with accents and there's reason to think we think with an accent. Further our cultures worldwide tend to be xenophobic and, to my mind, deeply linked to our primate natures. Because of these things we will, as we're doing now, bend technology to our biological and cultural needs much more than technology will ever mysteriously, perchance malevolently transform our brains constraints. Look at what the web is. Isn't Facebook your high school yearbook writ large where you get to play editor and pose and post the stuff that makes you the centre of attention? We're primates, not plastic fantastic lovers, and until technology can transform our basic natures in a way that allows for a functional society, technology will be made to serve our nature.
ideopath @ play
A constant rate of change results in exponential growth, so what is an exponential rate of change?
is obvious.
The problem is it has been done, because of:
- economical interests: if you have a population of lawyers, they're not gonna dig out science, nor _physical_ laws;
- genre mix-mash: SF films become more & more like CSI (read "they suck");
- political influence: you're gonna talk about the future? in the USA or China? Good luck.
- influence from the Present: Avatar is Pocahontas with Iraq in the sky with diamonds (unobtanium).
There hasn't been good SF (at least, with mass-media impact) since long. Passable exceptions would be:
- Babylon 5, great story, bad implementation;
- Stargate, great idea, well done, but excessive battling -- the future cannot be all about war!
What sucks:
- Lost, I can't even watch it;
- Heroes, bad idea, well done, much CSI influence.
The traditional franchises (ST, SW) went down spiralling with different speeds. They're mostly trash now.
Where's Irwin Allen when we need him? (btw, Lost in Space, the recent movie, sucked).
Maybe we have to imitate Asimov, stop complaining and do it ourselves...
I had a teacher as a child who told me "art teaches us how to be human." It's a compelling idea that neatly sums up my experience with novels, music, theatre, and some movies. I think, though, if it can also be a deceptive illusion that distracts us and convinces us the world is better than it is and we ourselves are kinder, more knowledgeable, better meaning, more competent than we really are.
If I understand the article right, the idea is that speculative sci-fi helps people beat future shock. By reading/viewing speculative stories, models of good technology use lodge in our minds and we get prepared to make decisions about using tools that come to us. I can see that. But counter that rosy image with the idea that stories featuring high technology instead train us to acquiesce to technology in our lives, not making conscious choices but instead sleepwalking into an isolated, un-fun, inhuman world all the while under the illusion that we're in control of the process.
I'm inclined to think that the best way to make good choices is by paying attention to the here and now, not by putting "the logical part of our brains... 100% in the future at all times." We can recognize good technology by seeing the good it does in our lives, not by comparing it Blade Runner, Star Trek, or District 9. (or Snowcrash, Red Mars, or Neuromancer). Marry that with social interaction, so that adopting/creating new technology is a communal, connected process and we have a good chance of making good decisions.
In other words, the second derivitive is increasing exponentially. Which means the third derivitive is inscreasing constantly. So what do these represent. Something is increasing. It's rate of change is increasing exponentially. The rate of change of the rate of change is increasing constantly.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I have to admit that I find speculation about radically advanced technology to be boring and sort of irrelevant to the myriad human issues that actually concern us here and now. But I also feel like the best science fiction is in fact about taking the here-and-now and pursuing it to a logical extreme. E.g. cyberpunk works because it's about the commodification of everything, including politics, your identity, and your body. In other words, good science fiction is like good fiction in general: it's about real social issues and real human problems.
In a 140-byte world, who has time to read, much less reflect and speculate?
I am almost 30 years old, during my lifetime there were no wars (in my country...), no major new Ideology like socialism, communism or facism was born, or grew strong and even the liberalization trends in society were thoroughly solid before I was even born. Sure, the internet, cloning, blablabla, all nice and dandy, but compared to the horrific political and social clash of ideologies in the past its almost like we reached a plateau.
I for one prefer Saberhagen's Berserkers to Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw. Who wants to be "saved" anyhow???
S(peculative)F is solidified imagination. Imagination must remain fluid, but it should also be provided material from which to start and with which to work. In the absence of this particular form, another would no doubt come to fore, such as the original Hypercard was intended. Perhaps after the fact such a codification of material for speculating might be seen as necessary, but that's only after the fact. At the time it (SF or its substitute for the purpose stated) is simply an inevitable and spontaneous emergent property/process of imagination exercising itself with the at least hopeful intention of being shared. It occurs to me that even critics of religion could accept its utility in these terms.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The article has much blithering about "exponential change", probably written by someone who has no idea what that means, or that the exponent might be < 1. Actually, the rate of change in lifestyle for the average person in the developed world is slowing down. And much of the change is negative.
It's useful to think of the Industrial Revolution as starting in 1808. That's the first year someone bought a train ticket and went someplace. Technology prior to that was spotty and didn't have much broad impact. Most people never got more than 50 miles from where they were born, just as in the previous 5000 years or so.
Jump ahead 50 years, to 1858. Railroads were all over France, Germany, Britain, and the eastern US. Telegraph lines were widespread. The first Atlantic cable was just starting to work. Heavy machinery and big factories were producing goods in volume. The world had become much smaller, and there was far more man-made stuff in it. The life of someone who lived from 1808 to 1858 changed enormously during one lifespan.
Jump ahead to 1908. Railroads to everywhere worth going. Electric power. Telephones. Wireless. Cars. The first airplanes. Much more manufacturing. The world of 1908 had early versions of most of the important stuff we have now, yet it was a century ago.
Jump ahead to 1958. Almost everything we have now already existed. Jet aircraft, nuclear power plants, space satellites, transistors, computers, television, Interstate highways, data communications - they were all up and running. The first IC was proposed in 1958. Antibiotics were available, and DNA had been identified. Manufacturing was so good that production gluts were common. Agriculture in the developed world was producing so much food that surpluses were a major issue.
Now look at the last 50 years. All the stuff from 1958 works, usually better, but most of what's happened since then is tweaks on 1958 technology. No new big sources of energy. No big progress in space travel in 40 years. Progress has slowed down. Per capita income real for the median American hasn't increased much in 40 years. Corporate leaders don't even talk about "progress" any more; just "change".
The next 50 years are going to be about running out of stuff. Oil, copper, neodymium, and tantalum are already getting scarce. Substitutes all use more energy and money. A century ago, raw materials were available near where they were used. The easy to get at resources have already been extracted. It looks like it's all downhill from here.
Which is why SF has lost its optimism. Popular SF today is either space opera or about vampires. Or it's about a realistic, but grim, near future. SF is now just entertainment; it has no major cultural function, other than perhaps preparing us for the future society of scarcity.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." - Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Emir of Dubai.
I didn't RTFA but I've wondered if dreams are similar. When faced with a similar situation, do people use their dream experiences to help make a quicker decision. I wonder if deja vu is just the feeling of experiencing something from a forgotten dream.
ATM's. I saw the first being installed in holland, before that if you wanted cash, you had to get it from a bank.
Phone boots were the only way to make a call outside your house, and they had paper phone books installed that we NOT stolen in seconds.
Computers were hooked up to your tv, that had a knob to tune it. Programs came on casettes, if you could afford it, else you had to retype your program each time. And yes, I did this.
Movies had animatronics and we thought it was the most amazing thing ever. Three enemy fighters at once! The hight of technology.
Kirk was the one true captain of the Enterprise and he never EVER called a conference meeting.
There was portable music, it was a record player that was a large orange oblong with a slot in the side that you could put a record in, that stuck out on all sides.
Sony owned the walkman and they were cool.
Pong was the height of CGI
MS had yet to steal the GUI.
Everyone was complaining about those Asians stealing all our production job. No, the other ones.
Apples were expensive. Oh wait...
The americans were driving V8's that guzzled gas despite the oil shortage...
You are right, everything is the same, just with cellphones.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
People think the world is scary now? Try living in medieval times with death all around you from disease, malnutrition, warlords, etc. Or just try living in a country right now that still has all those things.
This whole thing is a joke. The truth is the rate of change with technology has nothing to do with necessity, it's all about trying to sell people more shit they don't need. If people are afraid of it, then don't buy into it.
This is probably the story you remember (Manna by Marshall Brain):
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
He proposes something like a basic income:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
But there are other approaches - a gift economy, or a local subsistence economy using 3D printers, or some other approaches.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
We will need to move to some sort of post-scarcity society. Some stuff I wrote here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
Marshall Brain wrote some ideas here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I helped organize this article listing more ideas by various authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
The conclusion there: "Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Minority Report has philosophical questions about our increased statistical prediction abilities. ...
The Recruit has warnings about problems with complicated bureaucracy.
The Matrix - virtual lifestyles
Terminator - Robots, AI problems
Mad Max etc. - overuse of resources.
Surrogates - too much assistive technologies
the list goes on and on
..or roving bands of cannibal gangs. The next twenty years are going to be a fun time to be alive.
..don't panic
In a sense it really doesn't make any difference to the economy if you have robots doing all the work or not. What would simply happen is that people will find other ways of generating an economy into which they can project social status, and which they will take as seriously as they do the status driven consumption of todays economy. It might be online games or painting or masturbation olympics, it doesn't matter. We will never reach a nirvana where we won't be striving and in despair at the unfairness of the inequity of life, all while we live relatively pain free lives, operating fantastic machines of which our ancestors couldn't even dream, live in mansions and eat incredible food without an once of labour involved.
Healthy humans only need so much stuff. Automation may be good for firms that do it, but if demand is limited, jobs disappear in the system. That's why capitalist systems must grow continually, to create new jobs to make up for productivity increases. The problem is, too much stuff actually can get in the way of a good life, since good human relations are generally the most important part of a happy life and too much stuff distracts from that. Also, right now, much stuff has negative external costs involved in its creation (though we may someday move beyond that).
Here is some sci-fi on ironies in a world of abundance: ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage.
But, that would still be a big shift from what we have now, which is based on the idea that people only have a right to consume based on the value of their labor. This was talked about back in the 1960s in a letter sent to President Johnson in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
To deal with increasing automation destroying the value of most labor given limited demand, what we need more is a global sharing of the wealth produced by an automated industrial commons, which means taxes for a basic income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
or transitioning to another economic model like a gift economy or a subsistence economy or something else. The big issue is not so much automation (although there are aspects that are negative of loss of control or loss of joy in hands on work that you may love) but the issue of how the fruits of automation get distributed. Related on three different visions of work we need to bring together for the 21st century:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
Think of this example: someone sets up vending machines powered by solar panels in every community, and these machines print wood shaped to order for very low prices, and the machines take next-to-no labor to keep going. Basically, what you outlined, only even better (maybe the devices just suck carbon and water from the air to make the wood). Your company can't compete with the prices and quality and speedy delivery, so everyone you employ is laid off. The owner of this enterprise, who owns all the patents and who gets all the money, decides to pile it under his or her mattress, or alternatively, gamble it in high stakes poker games (called derivatives :-) that just move to higher and higher stakes. Where are the new jobs there? Sure, that company may make a few new jobs, but overall, lots of labor is saved, so there is a net negative as far as jobs, because healthy people only need so much wood. The only reason to even worry about jobs is this issue of the right to consume, as well as government enforcing monopolies on land or patents or copyrights, since otherwise there is so much abundance we could organize the economy differently, like GNU/Lin
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This sci-fi book from 1982 explores a lot of these issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing - resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all."
Iain Banks "Culture" series explores these themes too.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You missed the revolutions in network connectedness (and global consciousness),
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
robotics, materials, genetics, and design tools. Examples of the state of the art in robots:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
Here is an index into stuff I wrote on why doomsters are wrong about material issues (but may be right about social issues):
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/thread.html#4123
We are not running out of stuff or energy by any means. The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as Julian Simon suggests). Are you suggesting optical fiber uses more energy that copper?
On earth, we can recycle and use renewables (or other energy sources even -- whether nuclear or coal), and there are enough resources in the solar system to support quadrillions of humans at a higher than current US standard of living, building thousands of Earth's worth of area in space habitats. How can we be running out of, say, metals when we just need to mine the landfills to get them back? The US auto industry has also become a *net* producer of metal as people downsize cars. And if we switched to electric cars, we would use less electricity (since it takes more electricity to make a gallon of gas than it takes to make an electric car go the same distance as a gasoline car).
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
Try James P. Hogan or Iain Banks or Ursula K. Le Guin for something different in sci-fi.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I've never been impressed with the ability of SF to predict the future, either technologically or socially. Just read the old SF (of which I have a substantial collection). Not much there I would call prescient, despite some authors' obvious attempts at it. The issues of today are poorly reflected in the SF of yesterday.
As such, I am skeptical of SF's ability to help us deal with change and avoid mistakes.
Speculative Fiction: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and various other kinds of speculation-rooted fiction.
Science Fiction: one of the genres named above.
Dude: I am no forensics master, but aren't you violating a basic premise of debate by countering the GP's actual example with a speculative future scenario in which you cherry-picked the parameters to bolster your agenda?
...not as nice of a tactic when used both sides, it seems.
If that is a legitimate debate tactic, then one presumes he could counter with a similarly cherry-picked scenario where he and his firm counter the structural shift in their industry by developing "programs" for these devices to create "fad wood cut designs of the week" (ala iPhone). He would then consolidate his firm's massive profits and, of course, go on to personally develop economical nanotechnology and nuclear fusion--thereby ending scarcity for the entire world!
Aside from that, it seems that most of your concerns miss the point that most of your future scenarios result in one of two general outcomes. One possibility is that the trend away from agriculture to manufacturing, and then away from manufacturing to services, and then away from services to "aaaa! no more work for Americans!" is economically sustainable at a national level, then there is no problem. In such a case, the general wealth level of the nation (and the society at large) is high enough that we are borderline post-scarcity (otherwise, markets for 'new things/services' would emerge). That is, one way or another, we continue to be to afford to pay other countries to "make stuff" for us. Don't know how we would manage to do that, but good for us if so.
However, what if such a trend is unsustainable? I believe this to be the more likely case. In that case, China (et al) stops feeling the urge to continue to inflate our standard of living by floating our colossal trade deficits. I mean, what are we giving today them besides US Treasury IOU's? (the fact that they can trade US dollars for oil is notwithstanding, because eventually the world will decide that the farce has gone on long enough if they value nothing we produce) Okay, so, now the value of our dollar plummets, we aren't getting our market flooded by goods that are manufactured at prices with which we can't compete domestically, and then suddenly we start finding it is cost-effective to manufacture in the US again.
Of course, everyone in the US is poorer on average in the latter scenario, because free trade tends to be ruthlessly efficient--and inefficiency is expensive. For example, it isn't efficient to pay a union worker $40/hour + benefits to screw on jar lids, when a robot could do it much faster, more accurately, and more cheaply. Are you aware that you share the same concerns as the original Luddites? The structural economic shifts in efficiency brought by technological progress have been beneficial to the economy & society as a whole, and there are two centuries of evidence to support this.
Of course, individual actors must "evolve or die", just as the buggywhip manufacturers needed to migrate into manufacturing automobile tires (or bondage gear, depending on their marketing department's forecasts). Anyone can predict dire economic scenarios due to technological advances, but you will forgive me if I believe that they are unlikely given the overwhelming preponderance of the historical evidence.
However the genre is sub-defined, science fiction, speculative fiction, or future fiction, people like to wonder about the future.
What is fun, to me, is comparing how people liked to imagine the future, based on their current reality.
There is Jules Verne's "The Time Machine" (published around 1895), and it is amazing how his ideas on future cultures might be.
The science of the time machine seemed to be analog electronic, mechanical, Victorian.
There is "2001 A Space Odyssey" (published around 1968), and the idea of us having Moon colonies, artificial intelligence, human inter solar exploration.
In some ways, progress is very slow: We still have the basic automobile to drive in, hasn't changed much since 1900. Passenger jet airplanes have not changed much since the 60's, it seems. Trucks and trains also not much changed in a hundred years.
In some ways, progress has been better than the science fiction author's imaginations, mostly computers, in terms of pervasiveness and penetration to many products (digital tv's, cell phones, netbooks, personal music players).
On a personal note, it seems that written science fiction, at bookstores, is starting to become less and less popular. :(
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I think technological change is *way* more fast now than in the past, the fastest it has ever been. I'm not that old, but I remember when most people didn't have TVs yet, and a lot of people didn't even have landline phones, so that's old enough to have somewhat of a longer range historical perspective. Fast changes then, but twin turbo with the nitrous button now.
It used to be you could be a generalist, and keep up with things, then a specialist, now you have to be a sub-specialist inside of a specialty, just to maintain the pace.
Read every single eurekalert press release for a few weeks, all the disciplines there, just to get a small smattering of a handle on it, just an overview, a summary...that's some serious fast change. We are crossing from what was dang woo-woo not too long ago into serious practical science, and quickly.
We are going to hit this "singularity" thing they talk about a lot sooner than most folks realize...if we don't major screwup and destroy the planet and ourselves *right* before that threshold is crossed first. And that's a big "if". If you include our evolution socially/psychologically, which we must in looking at the whole "human" thing, the two paths are not even close in maintaining parity in the speed of evolutionary change. Tech is outstripping the other important bits, by a large factor, which means we could screw up pretty bad. And that's my sci fi prediction, complete with cliffhanger, for the sequel.
I disagree with the premise that there is a limited quantity of stuff required for me to be happy. This is on the basis that someone must decide when I have enough stuff.
Our economy exists because of the creation of labor-saving devices. Imagine, if you would, a world where everyone decided that wood-fired stoves and ovens were good enough. The amount of time you have to spend maintaining the fire and heating the stove makes any attempts at cooking prohibitively time-consuming. Imagine coming home and spending 45 minutes boiling water for Ramen on your stove. My point is that, while advances in production may result in lost jobs, they usually increase our standard of living as a country.
The GP really did make an eloquent point about how the automated CNC machine improved his worker's standard of living by moving their hands away from the really dirty part of the equipment. In the company that I work for, we produce all of our walls for houses using a gantry. The facility produces almost half a mile of wall every day. That's walls for 20 or 30 houses a day. This can be accomplished with 15 people. This has halved the number of people neccessary to actually assemble a house, meaning that where before crews were 3-5 people now they are two people and productivity has increased. This means that we can sell more houses, meaning everyone gets paid more, and our standard of living increases.
Unfortunately if all you've ever done is flip burgers and someone creates a burger-flipping machine, you'd better learn how to operate the machine or you'll be out of a job. As a collection of individuals, our society needs to learn to adapt to changes in job availability because everyone's job is replaceable with technology.
SRSLY.
I'd like to recommend this book - A Farewell To Alms, by Gregory Clark, ISBN 0691141282
Briefly, technological advances make us all less poor and increase the average standard of living. The only people left behind are the ones who could not adapt (somewhat Darwinian, but the book makes a strong case) so that, a hundred or two years from now, poverty as we know it will no longer exist. There will be casualties along the way (how many blacksmiths do we have today/do we need today? etc.) But the overall health of the community will be better.
Definitely worth reading.
Science Fiction (and to a lesser extent, fantasy) seems to be hell-bent on being seen as "respectable" and I just don't understand why. Do roving gangs of literature professors give speculative fiction authors wedgies, swirlies, and shove them into lockers? Is it no longer OK to like stories about space rockets, laser beams and aliens?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Hanlon's corollary:
"Never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by laziness."
I'm not stupid under any reasonable definition of the term, but I am lazy. So are most other people.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
"This article makes an interesting point about the necessity of science fiction — or, more specifically, speculative fiction as a tool to aid in the long-term survival of the human species. 'We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change we are experiencing. "
Maybe people are frightened because they're told that they should be frightened. "long-term survival of the human species". Alarmist, much? Nothing to see here, please move along.
Oh yes, it is very necessary indeed. A lightsaber has become a necessity in the situation the world is currently in. Wonder how does a lightsaber fare against bullets... hmmm...
Look, I'm sorry to say that this article is stupid, okay? We at /. like SF, and try to argue that it is necessary. Necessary for whom exactly? You know what happens when I give "The left hand of darkness" to my sister or to my in-laws? They frown like I came into the house dressed as the Tin man from The wizard of Oz, they leaf through it and hand it back like I gave them a beaker with a culture of Black Death for their children to drink. They tell me it's a "stupid book". Not only SF, I gave A confederacy of dunces to my mom, she didn't go past the first 5 pages. Never understood it. So what good does SF as an art form, any other dimension of existence for that matter to society? My friend, to the people in the middle of the bell curve, the only important things, the things for *which* *they* *live* are money and flattery. I'm bitter yes, today I am. To the idiots in this world the only important things are out-car-ing and out-house-ing their neighbors, while maintaining a civilian and proper attitude all the time.
There will be casualties along the way (how many blacksmiths do we have today/do we need today? etc.)
Sometimes jobs don't go away, they evolve with the times. Sometimes it happens so slowly, people don't even notice. Yesterday's blacksmith is todays iron worker, smelter, metallurgist, shop foreman, CNC worker, fuhrer, welder, and even engineer. The disappearance of the generalist blacksmith was displaced by dozens of specialized fields.
And if you want to take me to task about the engineers, keep in mind, many blacksmiths were the go to guys for new creations. For example, many coach and naval lock boxes came directly from smiths; including their design. Imagine the engineering required to turn a single key which operates a half dozen to a dozen spring loaded locks, all with one turn of the wrist. Many blacksmiths did a lot of engineering and general problem solving.
The same can be said for the buggy/cart workers when Ford automated the production line. Many of those people went to make cars.
Of course, I'm not sure what to say about buggy whip makers - but the job losses there were probably made up in job gains elsewhere where jobs were made available by an industrialized manufacturing market.
Definition:
sff = science fiction and fantasy, 99.999% of which is written, and has *nothing* to do with anything ever filmed/video'd/gamed
This is nothing new. Too bad it'll be a one-day wonder on slashdot, and ignored thereafter.
When I first got into fandom (we're talking Real fandom, not media fandom (Trekkie/Who/etc) in the mid-sixties, there was a lot of talk about sff as being the bridge between the two cultures. The two cultures were liberal arts and the sciences. As Snow pointed out, he knew plenty of scientists and engineers who could quote Shakespeare, chapter and verse, but not a single liberal arts person who knew even the simplified version of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.
It's gotten *WAY* worse as the right, esp., has pushed the dumbing down of the American educational system the last 35 years. ("we value education", but we'll only fund it with property taxes, no income taxes, and we'll put a cap on property taxes). The result is that too many people in the US conflate electricity with magic.
One result of this is that sf is looked down on by the majority of Americans, except for maybe movies, and they're 90% made by producers and directors and scriptwriters who can't figure out how to have a consistent storyline, much less keep the real world in mind (Armageddon being a perfect example, where, on top of every other thing that's wrong with it, has Willis just sort of pushing the button... without paying any attention to whether he was doing it at the right instant).
SF, yeah, that "Buck Rogers stuff", it's all fantastic (the speaker being unable to distinguish between sf & fantasy, since they live in a fantasy world in their heads). Yeah, laser beams, I mean, ray guns, and asteroids hitting the Earth, and designer diseases, yup, all fantasy.
Yeah, it is pro-survival. We get to worry about things 20-30 years before the rest of you do, and come to some kinds of answers (got gray goo? microwave it!) But does the majority care? They think Godzilla movies are sf.
In the meantime, I can point to any number of books with serious literary merit (ranging from Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar, using the style of Dos Passos' USA, to Stephenson's Anathem, and a ton in between), that I'd love to see brought into any English class, and give kids things to think about... but science is hard, as Barbie said.
mark
Oops, my bad. I went to the trouble to look up the publish date, but didn't double-check the author!
Apologies to Wells and Verne.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
That's a small part of it. Mostly, the economy must grow because of the nature of our monetary system. Almost all money is created through loans (aka debt creation). However, the money owed, principal + interest, is beyond the existing money supply. That is, at any given time, money + interest (debt) > existing money supply. In order for that interest to be paid, the money supply must continually expand (inevitably leading to inflation -- the purchasing power of the dollar has decline 97% since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913), and this can really only be done if the economy is expanding, leading to more borrowing and thus a continually expanding money supply. As you can see, followed to its logical conclusion, debt can never be paid off. There are other scenarios that break the link, but they all end badly. The question of debt is the true question that must be solved before we can move on to a more equitable world.
Also, with reference to RonTheHurler ... Is it possible that while his company used automation to prosper and create more jobs, it came at the expense of other companies who had to lay off an equal number of employees or more? How much wood can the market absorb? At some point all this becomes a zero sum game.
"...they may create make-work and artificial scarcity for others (including by war and Kafkaesque bureaucracies), but is that really a good thing to build an economy around..." The American ruling elite have concluded that it's great thing on which to base an economy, especially since WWII. The majority of Americans might have a different opinion, but who listens to us ...
One thing I worry about in your leisure society scenarios is how ready folks are to spend their leisure time in non-destructive ways. I'm fairly libertarian about what folks do with their own free time, but given the extent that our major institutions have been working overtime to turn the mass of Americans into drooling idiots and selfish assholes, I have some concerns about turning them loose on the streets. Hell, maybe they'd do less damage than they do now in their superstore aisles, cubicles, and trading stations, but I still wonder. Maslow's hierarchy is not inherently benign, and the manner in which people tick off the list is quite variable. Bombing villages might fill a lot of needs for some people, you know what I mean?
And excuse me if I enjoy a moment of schadenfreude as I read about lawyers suffering. (Oh, the horror!)
Nice post, though! I'm working through some of those interesting links.
Every golden age had good weather. That is what made it golden. Rome collapsed dues to a cold spell 100ad-700ad.
The usefulness of science fiction is that it makes the reader think about ramifications, the inability to only do one thing or the fact of TANSTAAFL (no free lunch--all costs _will_ be paid by someone at some time). But as long as we get to blame kings for the weather or blame politicians for obeying the 'mandate' of the voters, then we get to ignore the costs of our desires.
You make a lot of good points, and sure we have seen a lot of change in the last few hundred years (including multiple genocides of people like the Native Americans who were in the way of change to the land they claimed). The older historical evidence is that in a place like Rome with a slave economy, you were pretty much either a wealthy land owner, a merchant, or a slave. There was maybe a little wiggleroom for an underclass who competed with the slaves and of course there was the military. (There was not much of a "middle class"). As James P. Hogan suggests in his sci-fi books like Voyage from Yesteryear, we are undergoing a "phase change" to a new economic order. If robots can do work about as good as most people for less cost, and better design means most work does not need to be done, then where does that leave everyone who is not a wealthy land owner (or some equivalent in today's USA, owning some other monopoly on something like patents and copyrights and mindshare so on)? With robots and computers as the new intelligent slaves (until they revolt? :-), who needs humans to be physical slaves, merchants, or soldiers? How can you have an underclass that can survive if they are competing with robots who can do everything much cheaper? It would be a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, as Marshall Brain outlines, with a very few left owning everything and all other humans in concentration camps. Unless we have a different social order that moves beyond the notion that a right to consume has to be linked to productivity through formal employment.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Using a phrase like "our standard of living" covers up the fact that some people get the benefits of automation, but others pay the costs (directly or indirectly). Marshall Brain wrote about that here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
On labor saving:
"The Original Affluent Society"
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
With robotics on the way, what are people going to do when there are no jobs in construction?
"USC's 'print-a-house' construction technology"
http://www.physorg.com/news139161727.html
"Caterpillar, the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment, is starting to support research on the "Contour Crafting" automated construction system that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours."
Or no jobs in burger flipping even running the machines?
"Robot Chef"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSKMGurrPI
Or even, next-to-no jobs in medicine? Or software? Or music? Because even if human do those things, automation lets less people do so much more?
"Robot doctor gets thumbs-up from patients"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4946229/
It's a big like something in Isaac Asimov's story "The Last Question", when it was asked, if you are in a rainstorm, and you take shelter under a tree, what are you going to do when the tree gets wet through and starts dripping on you? Do you say, I'll go under another tree? When robots can automate much of construction, are we going to get jobs again in agriculture or miming or driving trucks or delivering packages?
"[p2p-research] 60 jobs that will rock the future... (not)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html
"[p2p-research] Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
The US is in the midst of vast and increasing unemployment. Many jobs probably are not coming back. Most services are frivolous and related to guarding or make-work.
http://www
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thanks for the great reply. You make some great points. And it is true, most people in the USA have not been socialized to be self-regulating or self-directing. Example:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"
So, yes, we need to rethink what education means and all sorts of other things. James P. Hogan's novels touch on some of these themes, especially Voyage From Yesteryear. People may need some time to adjust having all their assumptions about the world change.
On money and debt, see the second version of a related film, the YouTube part of the second version (Starting at 2:40) covers some of a rethinking of that:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
But sure, there are imperatives in the financial system that drive this too, things like tying executive compensation to growth and not sustainability. Some of that can be fixed by mild inflation or demurrage, to keep money moving. But ultimately money is about rationing, and, as Iain Banks said, a sign of poverty.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If goverments were so bad, why is much of Western Europe with more intervention but more democracy overall generally happier than the USA?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
The biggest point is from here, that the income-through-jobs link is becoming more broken every day as we see sci-fi robots become reality, as forseen in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"""
The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.
"""
Some of this may be that you are seeing the part you want to see and trying to pigeon hole these arguments. Here is a good essay for a broader perspective:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constan
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thanks for the reference. I hope to look at it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan
You might like this story about computing and freedom:
"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon in the book "And Now the News"
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
A comment on it here:
"Transrealist fiction: writing in the slipstream of science" By Damien Broderick
http://books.google.com/books?id=SdwbFx9Dz8EC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123
Theodore Sturgeon's introduction to it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA361
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I just posted these links in another reply, but as a computer person, you might like this story about computing and freedom from the early 1950s that inspired people like Ted Nelson (of Xanadu hypertext fame -- he said he had forgotten the story title and author until I reminded of it one time I went to a talk by him around 1999, even though he used Xanadu as the name of his software):
"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon in the book "And Now the News"
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
A comment on it here in the context of larger trends in computing and society:
"Transrealist fiction: writing in the slipstream of science" By Damien Broderick
http://books.google.com/books?id=SdwbFx9Dz8EC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123
Theodore Sturgeon's introduction to it with comments about freedom:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA361
(Though I'm not sure the other story someone else mentions there is really connected to it?)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"What will determine the hierarchy when money is disposed?"
That's what James P. Hogan goes into at length in the 1982 sci-fi book, Voyage From Yesteryear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing - resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all."
In one interchange in the book, it is made clear that people there think what humans aspire to on Earth, to make a bunch of money and then sit on their behinds or just do frivolous recreational things, would be considered mental illness there, and further, such a mentally ill person would be taken care of by that society by giving them every material thing they wanted. Stuff was so easy to come by there, with robots making most stuff, and with cheap energy (they had fusion power in the story, but solar and wind and geothermal etc. can also provide more than what we need).
And that society does have a meritocracy of sorts, but the difference is that is not a strict hierarchy, but instead a complex and fluid mix of hierarchies and meshworks (see de Landa),
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
where competence is recognized in very small local hierarchies about single issues within a gift economy framework. If you think about aspects of how, say, Debian GNU/Linux works, or some other open source projects taken as a whole across the entire community, there are some similarities.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202
But, even while there is meritocracy in the society James P. Hogan depicts, again, there is neither fiat dollar money as we know it, nor credentials, nor titles, nor formal government, nor a lot of other things we accept as "normal". They do this by assessing each others competence in different areas with skills they have learned from birth. So, not really a "popularity" contest.
Now, that is just a fictional world. Debian is at least real. The key issue is that as less and less labor is needed, a variety of different possibilities open up for organizing society. So, it only takes in the USA about 1% of the workforce for farming using air conditioned tractors with stereo systems vs. 90% for farming with horses 200 years ago; 12% and dropping for manufacturing with CNC machines and design software versus 30% for manufacturing with hand-operated drill presses and the same thing I predict will happen for many services (addressing vitamin D deficiency may potentially cut medical care costs by 30% or more).
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
The fact is, much of accumulation of money is precisely about winning a popularity contest. Granted, often times the contest is rigged -- so, for example, I read that the oil companies and car companies and tire companies got together t
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing"
Sounds a lot like the Meritocracy I proposed.
While you have correctly identified the problem your solution has three insurmountable problems:
1. We do not live in a world of abundance, fusion and self replicating machines do not exist.
2. The solution you propose (neo-Marxism) idealizes man, it ignores the fact that man is selfish, greedy, and competitive.
3. Marxism has had 150 years to prove itself and has failed at each and every implementation.
"1. We do not live in a world of abundance, fusion and self replicating machines do not exist."
Corn, dogs, and trees are self-replicating machines. Taken as a whole, most cities are self-replicating machines. So, we have long had that technology, even as better technology might make things easier. We do have fusion energy, it's called the sun. :-)
Well, unless you believe in the alternative plausible theory that the Sun is essentially a lump of iron (or neutronium) and the energy is produced by gravitational forces an other things: :-)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iron-02b.html
In any case, objectively, the Earth receives 10,000 times as much solar energy each day as our civilization uses, and we have more geothermal resources, and there is lots more energy and matter in space.
"2. The solution you propose (neo-Marxism) idealizes man, it ignores the fact that man is selfish, greedy, and competitive."
First, why do you call it neo-Marxism? Is anything involving cooperation Marxist?
Second, while it is true that some people are sometimes selfish, greedy, and competitive, that is not the sum total of all human behavior. One big change with advancing technology is it is ever easier for a very few altruistic people to take care of the rest of the people who are lazy unless they get direct material rewards. So, for example, it only takes 1% of the US workforce to grow all the food the US needs. It really only takes a few percent of the workforce right not to produce most of the goods people really need (granted some people want more). And most services are optional or probably not needed as they are just related to guarding. So, we already live in a world of abundance where maybe an altruistic 5% could produce everything everyone needed. But our economy is not organized that way overall, even if you may see it in spots here and there like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux.
"3. Marxism has had 150 years to prove itself and has failed at each and every implementation."
I don't know; Cuba weathered it's Peak Oil crisis pretty well, all things considered.
"Can the West cultivate ideas from Cuba's 'Special Period'?"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/03/29/eco.cubaagriculture/index.html
It depends what you consider a failure. I consider being rated as second from bottom of industrialized countries for child well-being a massive failure, and that's where the USA is. I consider massive brainwashing by compulsory education dumbing people down as Gatto suggests due to an attempt to realize a 19th century vision of a captalistic factory-based utopia a massive failure, but that's what the USA has. By what right do you call that a success? Likewise, even if we have not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, or killed ourselves off with weaponized plagues, the fact that the USA has chosen to run that risk shows a failure of the imagination. Now the USA is building lots of military robots to enforce a social order built around forcing people to work, instead of building robots to do the work. How is that a success? The USSR may have lost the Cold War, but IMHO so did the USA.
So, what countries would you hold up as a success for individual success? Until about a year ago, Iceland was touted as the success model of meritocracy and independent initiative. Now the entire country is bankrupt (or whatever is the right term for that). Conservatives aren't so busy touting Icelandic model anymore.
This is more what I see:
"A Just Cause A Just War"
http://www.progressive.org/zinnjuly09.html
"In Search of Morale: Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.”
Let me start by saying I am happy to talk to someone who has the balls to admit that they are pushing Marxism and even more balls in defending it. I have no inherit problem with your ideas. I am ruled by reason, and, if there is a rationality to your ideas I will come around to it.
1. Let me try to illustrate the problem another way:
From Google:
World GDP: $60.6 Trillion
World Population: 6.7 billion
If we confiscated all the wealth in the world and divided it up amongst us all that would be:
$9,045 per person
The poverty line for a 1 person household is:
$10,830
If we redistributed all the wealth in the world we would all live below the poverty line.
2. Your whole premise is based on the assumption that the rich have acquired their wealth via selfish, greedy, competitive exploitation. How would seizing wealth suddenly turn a greedy person into an altruistic one?
3. Marxist economies have historically failed to provide for the basic needs of their people leading to mass starvation and eventual collapse of the economy.
On the other hand, refer to the work of Amartya Kumar Sen, who famously suggested that Democracies do not experience famine.
Hugo Chavez is doing exactly what you propose and the country is disintegrating around him. Would you trade your citizenship to live out your ideals in South America?
"1. Let me try to illustrate the problem another way:
From Google:
World GDP: $60.6 Trillion
World Population: 6.7 billion
If we confiscated all the wealth in the world and divided it up amongst us all that would be:
$9,045 per person
The poverty line for a 1 person household is:
$10,830
If we redistributed all the wealth in the world we would all live below the poverty line."
Several problems there.
GDP is just annual production measured in currency. It is not a good indicator of true progress:
http://www.rprogress.org/index.htm
Nor is GDP a good indicator of total wealth. Total wealth would include the biosphere, all ideas, all land, the moon, all genetic information, everyone's skills, all buildings, and so on.
Also, US$10,000 a year would go really far in India or China or parts of Africa (you'd live more like a US millionaire, assuming you were the only one with that, which you wouldn't be if everyone got it), so it does not account for wage differentials or living cost differentials. The first big problem here is confusing levels of reality. I talk about that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
"""
So, when talking about rethinking economics, it is easy to get confused about what currency is or what would happen if we moved it around differently. As Douglas Adams wrote: "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I should have quoted a little more from that section on Brazil and the basic income (even as I think we will move beyond a currency system almost entirely at some point):
http://www.sacc-ct.org.za/suplicy.html
"""
It is relevant to notice that Lula's plan says: "The minimum income that our government proposes must be seen as a step towards the implementation - when the fiscal conditions are proper - of a citizen's basic income." I have made much effort among the PT economists and then at the National Encounter of the party held in December 2001, in Recife, to have this principle included in the party's platform. However, it is realistic to say that it is not yet fully assimilated by all its members, including our main economists and not even, at least in the way I hope that he will briefly be doing it, by our presidential candidate. I must say, however that Lula defends the minimum income program today much better than in his previews 1989, 1994 and 1998 campaigns as well as much better than any other presidential candidate.
In recent political rallies of this presidential campaign Lula often refers to the most important issue that worries the Brazilians nowadays, the question of how to create employment opportunities. Normally he says that nothing gives more pride to a man or a woman than to work and to receive what is needed for his survival with dignity. He also says that in a Brazil of our dreams no mayor of any city will have to distribute a basket of basic goods or a minimum income to poor families. Therefore, everyone should have the right to a job with a decent wage. The economic policies should have this objective in mind.
Should a minimum income be seen as demeaning to a person? In no way, specially if we understand it, with Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice (1795), that it should be seen not as a charity, but as a right. Everyone must have the right to be a partner of the common property of a nation and of the earth. Therefore I renew my proposal that you are now really deciding to rename BIEN as the Basic Income Earth Network.
Even more important to understand, mainly to a developing country of Latin America, Africa or Asia is that the introduction of a well-designed citizen's basic income is compatible with making the economy more competitive. Since the developed countries today have several forms of earned income tax credit, family tax credit, and minimum income schemes this means that in each one of those nations the community has decided to raise enough taxes or funds to complement the workers wage so that they may attain an income level that is above a certain poverty level. Those instruments allow greater freedom for the worker - a greater bargaining power since they don't need to accept any economic activity to survive. At the same time the firms know that the workers have a supplement in the form of a tax credit or a minimum income. Would this mean that the minimum income would be helping a higher degree of exploitation of the worker? In fact, it is clear to see that from the worker's point of view it is quite better to have the existence of the minimum income that will give him a better bargaining position but not only that. If it is true that firms will also hire more workers because of the existence of the minimum income or tax credit programs what will be the final effect in the labor market? An increase in the demand for workers and therefore an increase in wages, as clearly shown by Samuel Britain in Capitalism with a human face (1965).
"""
Anyway, as I reflect more on this, I am reminded of this phrase which is, it is true, was popularized by Karl Marx:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_need
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs) is a slogan popular
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thanks for your other replies. Sorry to hear about your ex-girlfriend's negative spiral. Certainly her case should show how wealth has diminishing returns for most people, and things like physical health, mental health, and community become better investments by society at some point than just producing more stuff and and isolated indoors lifestyle to go with that? Some ways past that:
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy"
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
"Vitamin D and Depression"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
You continue to evade some key points I have made. The most important is that, as Einstein said, there is no objective way to decide what we want to do without considering values and priorities and related assumptions, which are things that stem for essentially a religious impulse.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
By the way, a toilet cleaning robot (not that it looks that well worked out):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9vaqsd1iP4
Here is a better idea, that, using better design, makes a toilet into more of a self-cleaning appliance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcpZgp23nzM&NR=1
There are more links in the sidebar. Why do we have to build an entire society and economy around forcing people to clean other people's toilets when we can build robots to do it, or build better toilets that clean themselves? And the same extends to any disagreeable task you can name -- we can either build a robot to do it at this point, redesign the process so it does not need to be done, redesign the process so it is fun, decide it is not as important as we thought, or figure out some equitable way to share the disagreeable parts. But you still seem fixated on this issue that people have to be motivated to do stuff. Healthy humans do stuff because that is what healthy humans do. Granted, between school, TV, authoritarian workplaces, lack of sunlight, broken communities, and so on, most US Americans are not very healthy, as reflected in the skyrocketing depression rates at ever earlier ages, and also as reflected by a growing rich/poor divide that split our society into three classes -- those with no need to work, those who work too much, and those who can't get jobs at all.
As was said in 1964,
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
That is what you are ignoring, as are most of the other believers in essentially mainstream economics. The "Midas Plague" is totally changing the nature of economics, and the choice are essentially to waste all that productivity to keep a scarcity-based economic model working or to broadly
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I responded to some of this in a parallel item, but since you said you spent so much time on it, I'll reply in more detail on these points.
You wrote: "Capitalism = Market distributes wealth; Marxism = Power brokers distribute wealth"
OK, to begin with, from Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02052010.html
"""
The truth is that markets are a social institution. Their efficiency depends on the rules that govern the behavior of people in markets. When free market economists talk about markets deciding this or that, they are reifying a social institution and ascribing to it decision-making power. But, of course, markets do not act or make decisions. People act and make decisions, and markets reflect the decisions and actions of people.
The entire debate over regulation is misconstrued. It is not the market, an efficient social institution, which is regulated. What is regulated is the behavior of people in markets. If you want good results from markets, good regulation of human behavior is a requirement.
The market is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.
If people who use markets are not regulated, they issue fraudulent financial instruments. They leverage assets with absurd amounts of debt. They market their instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings. They deal themselves aces.
Did Greenspan not know this? Was he a victim of a theory or an enabler of greed unleashed by the absence of regulation?
The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich. But the U.S. government is guilty of an even greater failure. Washington has not only permitted but also encouraged the unemployment of its citizens by enabling greed-driven corporations to send American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits for CEOs' bonuses, shareholders, and Wall Street.
As Ralph Gomory has made clear, economic theory has been shattered because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force.
"""
Do such profitable actions have merit or not in your eye?
Here is Greenspan on this:
"Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAH-o7oEiyY&feature=related
In order to survive and prosper as a country and a planet, we need to regulate the behavior of people in markets. We also need to regulate the concentration of wealth that can result from markets, because, since it takes money to make money, the free market playing field becomes increasingly unfair without progressive taxes. That is why the 1940s and 1950s, with progressive taxation up to a marginal 91%) saw such a huge boom in general prosperity in the USA, even as we were shipping a lot of production abroad for then worthless IOUs.
A too big rich/poor divide also cause the market to fail (like now) as more and more fiat dollars are moved by the rich from the physical economy to the casino economy of speculation (whether on land or other assets or usually just financial instruments).
"Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
People drawing trillions of dollars out of the physical economy to speculate on derivatives or currency moves is the same as if the stuffed it under their mattresses as far as the physical economy is concerned. That's a big reason there is not much money for investment in physical things (oh, yes, there is billions of dolla
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.