View 822 Tuesday, April 29, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I have been depressed all day. The news channels are full of the story: Mr. Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been banned from attending any game played by the team he owns, or having anything to do with its management; and the commissioner will recommend that the owners require him to sell the team. They haven’t voted yet, but apparently the vote is certain.

I’m not depressed about the outcome. From everything I have heard Mr. Sterling is an unsavory person I would not care to meet, and the Clippers are far better off without him.

But Sterling has been tried and convicted in camera by the Commissioner. The charge is racism. The specification is that he was recorded by his mistress as having said that he did not want her associating in public with black people. Apparently it wasn’t that she consorted with Magic Johnson and other black celebrities, but that she did so publicly and got into the news for doing so, and that upset Sterling. He wanted her to stop doing that, and told her so. In private, not public, in circumstances in which he had every right to expect privacy.

Prior to that he is said to have made other racist remarks not now given in evidence; but he is also the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NAACP, and was scheduled to receive another in a few weeks. The awards were presumably given mostly for his financial contributions, but surely there was at least some investigation of his hiring practices and other public behavior before they were given. There appears to have been no public reason to denounce him until his mistress brought forth a recording of the conversation.

His mistress is of mixed parentage, African and Latino. The head coach of the Clippers is Doc Rivers, a black man whose house was burned down in 1997 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/28/doc-rivers-son-jeremiah-tweets-sterling_n_5224187.html) (http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/sports/rivers-burns-article-1.776410 ) . Like all NBA teams, many of the stars of the Clippers are black. Whatever Donald Sterling’s inner opinions of African Americans may be, his public image was not one of refusing to associate with blacks, and indeed was good enough to get him NAACP Awards. If he has unsavory views they are not made public.

Or were not made public until his mistress, apparently in a blackmail attempt that went very awry, taped his remarks about his wishing she would not publicly associate with black people and released the tapes. And now Sterling’s racist views, or something that can be interpreted as racist views, are public.

And thus Sterling is revealed as a clandestine racist, and must be stripped of his ownership of the team just as it has gone from being a sort of joke to an actual contender for the NBA championship. He is forbidden to attend any of the Clipper games. (Aside: is that actually enforceable? I’d hate to be the LAPD cop charged with forbidding the team’s owner from going inside the building!) he is guilty of racism, not publicly espousing racism, not of any crimes against black people, not of refusing to associate with black people such as his mistress, but of being an inner racist at heart. There is a name for this: it’s called Thoughtcrime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

And that is frightening.

I understand that as a practical matter no one strongly suspected of the racist Thoughtcrime can be the owner of an NBA team. Teams are teams, and the players rightly stand up for each other. If the owner is resented by the black players – whether all or only a significant number of them – all the players are going to be against the owner, quite possibly to the extreme of refusing to play, and it would be hard to say why this is not a proper response, and impossible to prevent. Once that recording came out, Sterling’s ownership of the Clippers was inevitably doomed.

And from everything I have heard about Mr. Sterling he is not a person I would care to meet. Were I a lawyer I would not want to defend him. I understand that his wife is suing his mistress to required her to give over various presents that he has given to the mistress. He is said to have refused to rent apartments in his Korea Town apartment buildings to non-Koreans – which is an act, a behavior, not a thought. But that was not listed in the reasons for forbidding Mr. Sterling from attending any Clippers games, including the one they just won tonight.

Sports stars, and sports team owners, come in all social flavors. Some are model citizens, pillars of their community, with stable families and admirable reputations. Others seem determined to have intercourse with almost any creature they encounter, a few not being restrained by having to obtain the consent of the potential parent of the liaison. Some have sexually transmitted diseases, and at least a few seem not to have reported this until it came out some other way. Some have exemplary family lives, but many do not.

Of course sports celebrities are hardly the only group for which this is true. The motion picture industry notoriously covered up similar acts, particularly in the era of Studio domination. Over time, though, few bother to cover up their wild lives, and some exploit them as an asset. Then there are drug activities. But of course the sports world is not immune to drug use, although the temptation there is for a different variety of drug.

I suppose the bottom line is that in future it will no longer be sufficient to keep your Thoughtcrime to yourself. As technology improves it will become easier and easier to record everything you say without your knowledge, and anyone who thinks he or she can profit from making your inner thoughts public will be able to do so. And as technology improves again, perhaps you won’t need to speak your thoughts: they can be recorded as you think them.

I’m not depressed in sympathy with Mr. Sterling. For I have none. But I am depressed that we move closer to the reality of legal punishment for Thoughtcrime.

Incidentally, one outcome of this mess has been the admirable way Doc Rivers responded to it all.

The US Supreme Court is currently hearing a case to decide whether police may routinely search your cell phone if they have any reason to arrest you, such as a traffic stop. The argument is that if you carry something on your person and come to the attention of the police, it’s fair game: as a result you may be prosecuted for possession of child pornography, the possession being discovered after a traffic stop. Or perhaps you have a message implying you are selling drugs. Other scenarios come to mind.

When thinking about the advance of technology and the movement toward Thoughtcrime, you might keep this in mind as well.

Niven’s Pesky Belters’ Torchships

Jerry,

I noticed your comment about belter singleships being able to destroy the world.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/the-future-of-work-continued-2/

Given a fusion rocket with plausible EV of 1/10 Cee and a plausible mass ratio of perhaps 2.7 (yes, e), then impact velocity is about 1/10 Cee and impact energy is about 4.5eex14 Joules or 1/10 Megaton yield per Kilogram. Assuming that the pesky belters’ torch ships mass about as much as two semi trucks or 100 tons or 1eex5 Kg, then impact energy is on the order of 4eex19 Joules or 10,000 Megaton or One Million Hiroshimas. However; given the 1/3 power scaling law for blast effects, then the lethal radius would be about 100 miles. This would be rather unpleasant for the impact vicinity, but it is no LUCIFER’s HAMMER. An assumption that I always made while reading Niven’s stories is that the UN and belter governments had some capability to intercept ships on high velocity impact trajectories (launching lasers), but the primary defense was the autodocs that kept everyone narcotized and conditioned.

My quibbling aside, you make an excellent point about the future of a society that allows the least successful people to breed unimpeded. Perhaps the CoDo raised Borloi on Tanith because it was not only a highly addictive narcotic, it was a highly addictive contraceptive?

James Crawford=

I remember now I had come to much the same conclusion regarding the lethal radius of a single ship accelerating from Ceres to Earth, but I didn’t keep the notes and it was long enough ago that I forgot the numbers I came up with Thank you for the reminder. Of course the secondary effects are not so easily calculated. The conclusion remains that Earth in Known Space is not likely to be a stable civilization; at least that is haunting enough that I have trouble writing in it. I do agree that “destroying the Earth” is conceding to the Belters considerably more power than they have. Still, a hundred miles centered on Washington DC or Silicon Valley would be a pretty severe event.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 822 Monday, April 28, 2014

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy.

Nancy Pelosi. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives

Referring to the Affordable Health Care Act

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

“…the only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us alone.”

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon

I have run into a flurry of distractions, and I seem to be coming down with the ache all over ye gods I feel awful stuff that appears to be creeping about in California – perhaps elsewhere?

We continue the discussion of the future of work:

Work etc.

Jerry,

Regarding your 26APR View, https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/the-future-of-work-continued/

two "reminders" come to mind:

Jim Hogan’s novel Voyage from Yesteryear, whereby the original robotics-supported settlers of the planet Charon had developed a political economy based on self-reliance and making meaningful artistic and scientific contributions over and above what the robots so plentifully supplied.

Stanley Schmidt’s essay wherein he suggested that the solution to the Fermi paradox was that any society that reaches the point where one madman (madbeing?) can command or leverage the energy (nuclear) or material (biological) resources to destroy the society in total will of necessity perish in that manner.

The former suggests that a society of plenty will eventually evolve into a society of scientists, artists/entertainers (which invites Spider Robinson’s "Melancholy Elephants"), and art critics (which invites Mr. Heinlein’s "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag"). The latter suggests that a significant fraction of the population will comprise threats to the lives and livelihoods of the rest; and significant, if not increasing, efforts will continue to be poured into controlling malcontents and attempting to block the activities of the madmen when they acquire their command or leverage of resources, or at least of those who wish to preserve their current power structure with its perks and control even when it flies in the face of the new system (which is basically how Voyage ends).

And then there is UN’s Agenda 21 with its stated assumption that the society of plenty will only be possible if the world population is corrected back to 18th Century levels, with most of the survivors living highly regimented lives in "sustainable" arcologies to support the relatively few elites who will actually enjoy the perks of the society of plenty.

Viewed that way, much of what is happening in the world today is rebellion against the evolving status quo, with the present societal elites (in all cultures but by different means – the Agenda 21/envirofascist "true believers," Putin, the Ayatollahs, the Chinese leadership, the Soros/Buffet/Bloomberg oligarchs and their foreign equivalents and international puppets – the new "feudal lords", the DemoRINO axis, etc.) trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle so as to maintain their own power and perks.

For what it’s worth….

J.

But of course a society of pleasant people who are satisfied with what they have presents no serious problem; how likely is that? The American welfare system provides a Middle Class Income (middle class = those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation; Aristotle) for everywhere in the world but the United States – for that matter Poverty in the United States sounds like riches to most of the world – but our cities are not islands of pleasantry, peace, and order. Yes, they are more peaceful than some places have been, but TV series like SOUTHLAND and The Shield show a different situation, as does the daily press. We have free schools, although most of us try to keep our children out of them – as do most teachers who can afford to do so. I know some LAUSD teachers who would rather stay home with the children, but who need the benefits and income so that their children can go to private or religious schools. And the results of the Catholic school system seem to be better than the results of LAUSD by a lot, despite LAUSD’s lavish spending per pupil.

Perhaps if we can limit the population through selection of those who area allowed to have children? Niven’s ARM series errs in that it shows overcrowding as the reason for the search for unlicensed children – you’re not approved for reproduction – but perhaps it is not overcrowding at all we need to avoid. Just don’t let criminals breed.

That hasn’t worked out all that well for China, but perhaps with American bureaucrats we can bring it off?

I pointed out to Niven that his single ships owned by the asteroid miners were each capable of destroying the earth if someone were angry enough to do that, and defense against that would take a lot more effort than is devoted to that job in the Known Space series; it’s one reason we don’t write in that universe when we work together. I have no solution to the problem of the mad scientist who wants to rule the world or destroy it – and who may have the means to do that. Captain Marvel was the solution to the problem of Dr. Sivana, but that is not a practical solution.

My Co-Dominium series tried to address some of these problems, but that wasn’t the emphasis of the stories, and I never did much with the theme. Now, with 3-d printers and cheap energy and Moore’s Law working inexorably it seems reasonable that just about any society with enough order and capital can provide a large part of the population with the means to live as Middle Class – without any work. We do not know if that will be stable.

We do suspect that Nothing is beyond the dreams of avarice.

And then there is UN’s Agenda 21 with its stated assumption that the society of plenty will only be possible if the world population is corrected back to 18th Century levels, with most of the survivors living highly regimented lives in "sustainable" arcologies to support the relatively few elites who will actually enjoy the perks of the society of plenty.

At least we know there will always be jobs for good soldiers. How we get them may not be as simple as most usually think. “Gold will not get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get you gold,” said Machiavelli. “See my armies, see how their bayonets gleam,” Napoleon said to Talleyrand. “Sire, you can do anything with a bayonet except sit upon it.” And as Ortega y Gasset observes, rule is not a matter of the iron hand, but the firm seat.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 821 Saturday, April 26, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I had intended to work on the acknowledgments of the California Sixth Grade Reader, but I discovered that LASFS is celebrating the 4000^th meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, and they had scheduled me, Niven, Davit Gerrold, and Craig Miller to do a panel on LASFS and pro writers, and had brought in Tim Powers from San Bernardino to talk, and as usually happens when Tim and Serena come to town we put together a dinner. The result ate up the day, so I’ll have to get to the acknowledgements tomorrow or Monday. That has become my highest priority project. It should have been out the door a long time ago.

Last time we had an essay by Eric Gilmer on the future of work, with my comments. Please read both if you haven’t already, or if you read them but forgot what was said.

The Future of "Work"

Hi Jerry,

I found Eric Gilmer’s short article quite interesting. We certainly do live in interesting times. For the most part, I think most generations have. It’s just that today, the details of our interesting times change just about as fast as we buy new shoes.

Eric makes a number of interesting points, but the one I’d like to focus on is the notion of work. I’m sure you would agree that what most of us consider work would look nothing like what most considered work in the Middle Ages or Pharoanic times in Egypt. Each era had tools, but those tools enabled the muscles of men to work more efficiently at producing the goods they needed to survive. They certainly survived better than those who lived prior to the Stone Age.

We seem to be living in the culmination of that process. Each generation since the earliest man learned to use a rock to break open a hard shelled nut or a stick to defend himself has made improvements in the tools humans use to survive. Even in the early Americas, some tools changed more rapidly than people could be educated to take advantage of them, however. Today, as Eric points out, most of our tools are driven by computers and we are at the beginning of a time when our tools will improve themselves as they seek to do the jobs once performed by men. They will be more efficient, quicker, cheaper, and the goods they produce will be endlessly varied, inexpensive, and even uniquely crafted for each individual’s taste. Once this occurs, what then of Man?

During my college years, I remember reading of a sort of war of the Scribes Guild vs the Printers Guild in one or more of the states of Europe. Things sounded very similar to Union vs Manufacturer debates of today. Printers/Manufacturers: "We will make more knowledge/goods/services available to the people." Scribes/Unions: "You are destroying jobs for the sake of money." What neither side could see at the dawn of the printing press was the huge shift that took place in Man’s relationship to the world as more and more people gained more knowledge from the books and pamphlets made available by the printing press. Much of what we have today was made available by that wide spreading curtain of knowledge that helped move Man up and away from the poverty and misery of his ancestors. Like the printing press, however, the invention significantly preceded the gains humanity would reap from it. It took time for what the printing press brought to be felt in human society.

Today, we are still in early development of our "printing press".

Just as with the printing press, computers will result in the fall of nations (perhaps already have), the elimination of jobs, and the expansion of what it means to be human. Today, entire countries and economies can do quite well with 20-25% of its young people not "gainfully employed". That does not mean they do not work. They just do not work in what has traditionally been called work. Just like the printing press and many other inventions throughout the course of human history, computers will redefine the meaning of work, leave many behind during the years of its development into a stable and ubiquitous tool, and cause individuals to develop entirely new ways of thinking about the universe and Man’s place in it.

In the future, just like we who are in the future our grandparents made possible, work will mean something different. I will probably not mean 9-5, mass migration of populations at the beginning/end of the day to centers of work. Humans may very well do their "work" in their sleep leaving the entire day for leisure and the arts. Some humans will work harder than others. Some, perhaps most, will do no "work" at all. What that sort of world will be like I can only dimly see, but my multitasking, quick thinking, and deeply knowledgeable through their cell phones grandkids will make happen. It will be horrible and it will be glorious, just like every major change before it.

Braxton S. Cook

It is certain that in modern industrial societies well advanced into the Computer Revolution the nature and meaning of work will change. Meanwhile, we move toward a society in which an increasing number of citizens of the Republic have no contribution to make: they are literally proletariat, persons who contribute only their progeny. Now there will always be some people of this classification, but it is unlikely that those who do “work” and whose contributions are absolutely necessary to keep the high productivity system of robots and tools running and producing the means to support everyone will choose to submit to being governed by the much larger number who contribute nothing, and who seek increases in their entitlements. Note that in the United States, we define as poverty an income and amenities – having teeth well past age 70, a fair amount of health care, the possibility of transportation at fairly rapid speeds, durable clothing, other such things taken for granted – would have been considered wild riches beyond the dreams of avarice for most of human history. Poverty in the US is still wealth in most of the world.

How long this can continue is a matter for concern. If Moore’s Law continues to operate, productivity will increase monotonically and perhaps exponentially. There will be lots of goods to distribute. Perhaps stability can be bought with the surplus value, not of labor as Marx thought, but of capital – robots – even thought Marx based much of his analysis on the premise that “Capital is barren:.” What that meant is that the building of machines used about as many resources as the machines would contribute to the economy. That wasn’t really true in his time, and became increasingly less true as the industrial and then the computer revolutions developed, and is certainly not true now. In agriculture we have moved from more than 80% of the population being required to work in agriculture to feed the population in the early Twentieth Century, to the point where far more food, both per capita and in absolute quantity, is produced by fewer than 10% of the population; and this is a permanent change.

Manufacturing is undergoing a similar transformation. In both cases capital was hardly barren. Productivity increases steadily. Fewer and fewer workers are required. This continues.

And our schools continue to be unwilling or unable to train people to do work that someone will pay to have done.

The Future of Work and Everything Else Part 2

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

In my last message to you I believe the tone I set may have been somewhat dour. Ignorance in the face of great change does that to me, but I am, nonetheless an optimist; that special brand of mental illness that allows me to ignore the capacity of Humanity to inject every favorable situation with the politics of greed, fear, race and religion and to believe there is reason to hope. I would not be fully representing my thoughts on the subject if I didn’t mention what I believe to be some of the more hopeful possibilities in the coming years, or at the very least a few of the highlights.

I can imagine a world that has defeated old age and disease; where we don’t lose our best and most experienced minds after a few short decades, a world where even our finite resources on earth are adequate due to super efficient manufacturing. If Humanity can achieve something like energy security (I won’t discuss the seemingly permanent 30 year horizon for fusion energy) than it is just possible that the coming decades will see greater peace and prosperity than at any time in our history. Every generation won’t have to re-learn the old lessons…imagine what that might be like: Humanity can keep it’s wisdom and not lose it to the grave every three score and ten.

The development of a permanent Human presence in the solar system will be greatly aided by the advances in materials science, energy storage and medical therapies that can correct the health issues surrounding prolonged existence in micro-gravity, or increased exposure to radiation. Additive manufacturing will make colonies cheaper to establish and more robust in the face of prohibitively expensive supply runs from Earth. longer lifespans may offer the potential of travel to the nearest stars even without an FTL drive. With durable, able robots as our Assistants Humanity may be able to achieve goals that we all discard with adulthood, or never consider due to the constraints of life as we know it. We could build a world without want, without illness and work for goals now unattainable due to our short lives.

Regardless of my optimism (which has yet to make it’s way to the DSM), I am not so far gone as to believe in Utopia. Nothing ever created has been shared evenly (presuming that would be a good thing) and no good thing has ever been developed that has not also been abused, or has more…complicated ramifications.

For instance; human existence without ageing and death will see a generation that has never (or rarely) known loss. Medical technology that cures every disease, heals every wound and factories that produce endless, cheap goods will produce a generation that has no knowledge of pain or want. I don’t know about you, but on the rare occasion that I meet someone who has been ‘blessed’ with a trouble free life I have always sensed something missing about them. They seem somehow incomplete.

I believe there is a potential problem with a generation that knows nothing about pain or struggle. Children that never grow up cannot drive a civilization, at least not one that I want to be a part of. There must be an answer for this just as urgently as the need for a new business model. Pain has been a constant companion of Human existence and is our great teacher. Pain teaches us compassion and humility. Pain makes us grow up, forces us to look inward. Take pain away from a Human and I will show you someone who will never attain their potential.

As for a new business model, I will defer adding to this discussion. Business of the future in light of our new knowledge and abilities is beyond my training. I hope abler minds will weigh in. The importance of it can’t be understated: Business drives progress. Profit drew adventurers to the New World and it will be profit that draws them to Space. But where is the profit of the future? What will have value in an era that has banished scarcity? Land, of course, but what else? And if there was a ‘thing of value’ that had not been eliminated by cheap manufacturing, who could purchase it? I’m not asking these questions as a prelude to answering them. I’m asking these questions because I have no idea and I hope to Hell someone else does.

I will conclude by saying that I don’t believe every answer must come before the change. Much if not most of the coming changes will occur just as all other changes have; unconsciously and by a combination of capable, pivotal figures as well as the unthinking reflexive nature of Humanity in aggregate. I think that is the very definition of a chaotic system. The future, then may be different than the sum of it’s parts and is likely only to be understood in retrospect. So when future is past we can look at it again and ponder how close to the mark we hit.

Thank you for your continued patience with my musings. Again, I apologize for my errors and oversights. I want to contribute to the discussion, not monopolize it, however, so I invite criticism and new ideas.

With respect,

Eric Gilmer

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 821 Thursday, April 24, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

It has been a busy day and I got some work done. I’ll do more tomorrow.

Here is an essay by a reader that is well worth your time:

the future of work and everything else

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

Some time ago I sent a missive to you on the subject of the future of work. If the subject has not run it’s course, I would like to ruminate with more care than last time.

The question is thus: What would a society that requires 50 percent or fewer of it’s population to run it look like? Personally, I think 50 percent is an optimistic figure given the advances in computer technology, but I won’t beat that drum too much. Let’s say half of everyone born has insufficient intelligence and potential to serve society in any meaningful way. These poor souls we relegate to the status of ‘irrelevant’. Those fortunate enough to be blessed with good genetics and make favorable choices in life (don’t become artists or philosophy majors) will have a role…potentially.

Of course, what we are really asking is ‘what will the next 50(40, 30, 20) years look like." and this question has been asked 50 years ago by luminaries and laypersons alike and with very little to distinguish between them in the area of predictive accuracy. But in the words of Kenneth Boulding, "What can we really know about the future? Precious little! But that little is precious."

We know for a fact that a trend exists in Western societies that is eliminating roles in favor of automated systems. These roles range from factory workers to junior lawyers. The technological sophistication that permits the replacement of Human workers is not standing still; presumably more and more Human roles will fall into the category of, ‘cheaper to perform with a computer/robot’. The cost to a firm or an industry of course, is not necessarily the same as a cost to society. I’m not a socialist…I don’t believe in penalizing ability or shackling industry. The process of replacing work with invention is not new after all, but our previous experience is not going to be our future experience and I will tell you why I think so.

Until quite recently, most invention created more work than it replaced, or at the very least supported a change of environment that was conducive to more Human involvement rather than less. I won’t debate this. I’m not sure I would win, but it seems that the printing press replaced scribes but helped create the modern era and it’s plethora of previously unimagined roles.

Now, however, we are finally creating man plus, only it is not a man. Where before we created tools to solve specific questions, i.e.; how do we print many copies of books without requiring an army of monks to transcribe them? or, how do we facilitate the production of goods beyond what the craftsman/apprentice model can produce? Now we are creating a pre-cursor tool; a tool that answers every question; How do we do ‘X’, answer: use an intelligent robot. It doesn’t matter what ‘X’ is, the answer is the same. No new Human roles will emerge from this paradigm because ‘X’ will always be ‘not-Human’.

Alright, let’s assume that in the early stages 50 percent of the available workers will still be needed. They will be needed to make executive decisions, for oversight and overall planning, perhaps even some limited software engineering and whatever other role that software and robotics haven’t developed the flexibility and sophistication to replace. I can’t believe that the current economic model could support this, but it will certainly try. Will the current model shatter or transform? Will political instability, grinding poverty and ossification of a new social class system become our future (presumably just prior to total collapse), or will some new system replace it?

What are some of the other factors that will likely mold our future? Additive manufacturing for a start. In it’s more mature form additive manufacturing becomes molecular manufacturing and drives down the price of ‘things’ to effectively zero. Imagine a nano-factory where you have a hopper at one end with a colony of nano disassemblers into which you shovel debris of any kind and at the other end is an output of any particular device you want, provided the raw elements on hand are what is required for it’s manufacture. This may not be so far distant as many suspect and certainly in the mean time additive manufacturing will drive down the price of manufactured goods dramatically.

Another likely development will be the development of control over the aging process. Once thought of as centuries away if ever, now most in the industry argue over whether it will be possible in 20 years or under a century. Since most of the most dramatic advances in microscopy have been developed only in the last 3-5 years I think sooner rather than later. There are still conservatives in this field, but I suspect that they pander to the peer review and grants infrastructure, rather than any objective assessment of the field.

And this brings me to an important point: Advances are progressing many times faster than institutions that exist to monitor/regulate. The economy and political systems of today are no different than they were decades ago, at least not substantively so. The technology which is set to tip everything on it’s head is simply running ahead of our civilization’s demonstrated ability to adapt.

This may not be as dire a prediction as seems implicit, for society changes only when it must and never before has so much been required of it. Since there has never been a time like now and the coming decades, it still remains to be seen if adaptation is possible for our existing system of governance and economics.

So back to the beginning and still no answer to the basic question. In fact I seem to be further from an answer than when I started. I simply don’t know what a society that does not need that many people to work would look like or how it would function. When I was a lad I wanted to be Jack Holloway on Zarathustra, or fight for a chance on Tanith or if I’m lucky on Sparta, or ship out with Col. Falkenberg. Alas, in spite of the great and terrible changes on the horizon, still no FTL to propel us to new homes and frontiers. If the experiment fails here, no back-up somewhere else. Whatever the near future looks like, humanity is going to know what obsolescence feels like.

Thank you for putting up with my near endless rambling. I hope it adds rather than detracts from the discussion and that my many omissions, errors and oversights will be forgiven.

With respect,

Eric Gilmer

And all that assumes that it will continue to be stable. But I note that the rules for college debate are no longer in vogue: “F—the rules. F—the time. I will talk as long as I like.” The rules change, and the very notion of an orderly society is denigrated.

The center cannot hold. That seems awfully true.

Perhaps the thingmaker will make enough things to distract everyone. And surely someone will still be needed? Hope spring eternal. 

Marx pronounced that capital is barren – that is, it took more labor to produce and maintain capital investments than they generated.  He came to this conclusion from examining industry and commerce as he saw it in the 1840’s, particularly in Thuringia, and perhaps it was an accurate observation for its time and place; but clearly that is no longer true.  In Marx’s time 80% and more were devoted to farming and food production.  Now the percentage of laborers required to see that a modern society is fed is well under 10%, and if you ignore the boutique markets it is less.  And as the robots get smarter, they take less supervision.

And again I really urge those interested in robots and the future to invest the time to read Freefall from the beginning. You will enjoy it, and it won’t make sense if  you skip to the end. Start at the beginning and go to the end.  I’ve done that twice now.  Worth it.          http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

Written in 1919

Nightmare Number Three

Stephen Vincent Benet

We had expected everything but revolt
And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking–
But there’s no dice in that now.
I’ve heard fellows say
They must have planned it for years and maybe they did.
Looking back, you can find little incidents here and there,
Like the concrete-mixer in Jersey eating the wop
Or the roto press that printed ‘Fiddle-dee-dee!’
In a three-color process all over Senator Sloop,
Just as he was making a speech. The thing about that
Was, how could it walk upstairs? But it was upstairs,
Clicking and mumbling in the Senate Chamber.
They had to knock out the wall to take it away
And the wrecking-crew said it grinned.
It was only the best
Machines, of course, the superhuman machines,
The ones we’d built to be better than flesh and bone,
But the cars were in it, of course . . .
and they hunted us
Like rabbits through the cramped streets on that Bloody Monday,
The Madison Avenue busses leading the charge.
The busses were pretty bad–but I’ll not forget
The smash of glass when the Duesenberg left the show-room
And pinned three brokers to the Racquet Club steps
Or the long howl of the horns when they saw men run,
When they saw them looking for holes in the solid ground . . .
I guess they were tired of being ridden in
And stopped and started by pygmies for silly ends,
Of wrapping cheap cigarettes and bad chocolate bars
Collecting nickels and waving platinum hair
And letting six million people live in a town.
I guess it was that, I guess they got tired of us
And the whole smell of human hands.
But it was a shock
To climb sixteen flights of stairs to Art Zuckow’s office
(Noboby took the elevators twice)
And find him strangled to death in a nest of telephones,
The octopus-tendrils waving over his head,
And a sort of quiet humming filling the air. . . .
Do they eat? . . . There was red . . . But I did not stop to look.
I don’t know yet how I got to the roof in time
And it’s lonely, here on the roof.
For a while, I thought
That window-cleaner would make it, and keep me company.
But they got him with his own hoist at the sixteenth floor
And dragged him in, with a squeal.
You see, they coöperate. Well, we taught them that
And it’s fair enough, I suppose. You see, we built them.
We taught them to think for themselves.
It was bound to come. You can see it was bound to come.
And it won’t be so bad, in the country. I hate to think
Of the reapers, running wild in the Kansas fields,
And the transport planes like hawks on a chickenyard,
But the horses might help. We might make a deal with the horses.
At least, you’ve more chance, out there.
And they need us, too.
They’re bound to realize that when they once calm down.
They’ll need oil and spare parts and adjustments and tuning up.
Slaves? Well, in a way, you know, we were slaves before.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t.
(I wish I hadn’t looked into the beauty-parlor
And seen what was happening there.
But those are female machines and a bit high-strung.)
Oh, we’ll settle down. We’ll arrange it. We’ll compromise.
It won’t make sense to wipe out the whole human race.
Why, I bet if I went to my old Plymouth now
(Of course you’d have to do it the tactful way)
And said, ‘Look here! Who got you the swell French horn?’
He wouldn’t turn me over to those police cars;
At least I don’t think he would.
Oh, it’s going to be jake.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t–
And I’d go down in a minute and take my chance–
I’m a good American and I always liked them–
Except for one small detail that bothers me
And that’s the food proposition. Because, you see,
The concrete-mixer may have made a mistake,
And it looks like just high spirits.
But, if it’s got so they like the flavor . . . well . . .

Stephen Vincent Benet :

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.