The personal computer has already had its day. It has never been an
iconic consumer product in the same way as family photographs,
bicycles, radios, phones, fridges, washing machines, televisions or
cars were. That is, they were all extremely expensive to start with
and took weeks, months or years of hard saving to buy as they
gradually filtered downwards from the very rich to the ordinarily
poor. These are the sorts of things that have powered the
industrial-consumer revolution for the last 200 or 300 years. These
iconic products have stayed with us, too, largely unchanged. They are
permanent features of our typical way of life.
The personal computer has never been one of those. Within a lifetime,
it has proceeded from being a toy for boys, to being a status symbol
for the educated elite, to being a revolutionary catalyst in
industrial and commercial organization and a sub-assembly in many
products. It will soon be as small as, as cheap as, and as
easy-to-use as a mobile phone. The personal computer has never been
unique in the same way as all the other iconic products were. It was
always an amalgam -- albeit a very brilliant one -- of the library,
or the personal letter, of board games, or pornography, of journals
and newspapers, or schools and universities, of the concert hall and
cinema, and many other things besides. Versatile though it has always
been, it will soon disappear, particularly when very powerful and
very advanced voice recognition software is available from a cloud on
the Internet.
But where are the new, unique, iconic consumer products? Where are
the things to power economic growth in the coming years? They don't
exist. They petered out, roughly with television and cars, at around
the 1980s. Unconsciously, manufacturers and retailers realized that
they had no more consumer products for which people would save hard.
This is why, since then, there has had to be a string of financial
innovations in the credit industry from hire-purchase through to
credit cards through to the most fanciful derivatives used by the banks.
It is this, at bottom, which may well be the reason why Western
Europe, Japan and America are now poised, dithering, on the edge of
what will prove to be a long-term economic recession (in the terms
that economists presently use). Consumers, investors, manufacturers
and retailers are all losing confidence in the future, according to
all the polls. Maybe there's still hope for the emergent countries
such as China, India, Brazil and several more. Together, their
consumer market, as yet unfulfilled, is already almost as large as
the consumer market of the West. If they get their act together with
a stable common trading currency then they could survive and catch us up.
In the West, this is a classic Emperor's New Clothes dilemma. Very
few economists, and almost no politicians dare whisper the
possibility that we might now have reached a sort of 'locked-in' way
of life. In truth, a steady-state economy might have already arrived.
If economists and politicians were imaginative enough to admit this
possibility then they could perhaps begin to see that this needn't be
the end of the world. We're still innovative. We can still become
more efficient. We can still increase the satisfactions of daily life
and vastly increase our educational methods and health care. In
material goods for everyday life we have simply reached a pause
point. It may be a case of reculer pour meiux sauter, as the French say.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/
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