Pete said:
>The radical impulse that leads to your suggestion of outlawing
>wages affects me at times, as well, though with different results.
>These days my thinking runs to what may be the implications of
>the saturation of the planet with humans. I gave an analogy a
>few years back considering the technological advances which have enabled
>us to populate the world so successfully, which have relied on armies
>of labourers to stoke the engines of industry. I said that it
>was rather like a large ship on a long ocean voyage, which required
>a large crew to operate the various gadgets needed to keep the ship going.
>At some point on the journey, the people in charge of the ship
>announce that they have made several new technological advances,
>and so the vast majority of the crew are no longer necessary.
I'm not sure that your analogy really fits what is happening. The incomes
of people that have been needed to stoke the engines of industry have risen.
Education and skills have risen as the engines have become more technically
sophisticated and complex. With rising incomes and education and greater
demand on people's time, birth rates have fallen and population growth has
greatly slowed. Currently - and really for some time now - the highest
population growth has been experienced by people who have virtually no
engines - the poorest and most traditional of societies. Many of these
people live in parts of Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Among
them, birth rates have remain high but death rates, given modern medicine,
have greatly declined. Income levels and education have remained largely
stagnant. Give these people engines to stoke, and it is probable that they
too, like the rest of us, will curb their own population growth.
>It seems to me we find ourselves in this sort of situation. We
>have generations of workers who have carried the load to bring
>our civilization to where we know find it. If they are no longer
>needed, I don't see it as ethical that we throw them over the side,
>but I see a responsibility on the part of those who have the power,
>money, and control of the direction of society, to look after
>the rest of the population just as if they were the crew of a ship
>at sea. So I ask myself, were I a seacaptain with a large, potentially
>idle crew, what would I do? I believe I would ensure they were fed,
>clothed and sheltered, and then I would set them to work maintaining
>the vessel in the best possible operating condition. When this
>proved to still leave lots of idle time, I would set them to
>training for useful abilities which could be used in times of
>emergency.
The most basic characteristic of the world we have created by stoking the
engines is change and, very often, change that is rapid, unpredictable and
uncontrollable. The proper response may no longer be to try to understand
the world as a relatively fixed and stationary system or model, complete
with buttons to push in the event of "emergencies", because it is certain
that it will be different, and unpredictably different, tomorrow. The best
approach may be an essentially cybernetic one in which we have some
approximate idea of where we are now, assume emergencies to be continuous
and ever changing, and are quickly and flexibly able to respond to new
situations as they arise. When you think about it, this is how governments
and international agencies have tried to behave during recent decades, but
their response times have been far too slow because they were inherited from
an earlier world of much slower and qualitatively different change.
>So how does this analogy translate back to the real world? It seems
>to me that the future must necessarily involve more control over
>individuals, no matter how distasteful we may view it. Freedoms
>must inevitably curtailed as real space to exercise freedom decreases.
>....I anticipate regulation of procreation, sometime fairly soon.
No. As I suggested above, the population problem is not universal. It is
confined to a relatively few densely populated areas. Even there it is
difficult to say how much of the problem is economic in the sense of
population outrunning resources and how much is socio-political and
therefore due to bad organization and institutions. The parts of the world
in which control is most needed would also be the most difficult to control.
The institutions are simply not there. How would you do it? Move in an UN
peace-keeping force?
Educate people, give them productive work to do - ie., give them hope for
the future - and they will control their own populations.
Ed Weick
