At 12:55 19/11/2011, Pete Vincent wrote:
(PV) I don't think I have any strong objections to your list here,
but I will add that a strong component sculpting our future is very
likely to be a sharp rise in transportation costs, particularly for
long distance bulk shipments, so both resources and commodities are
going to either be local or expensive.
(KH) I agree. I envisage energy costs rising to a peak in 20/30
years' time and then perhaps stabilizing as advanced country
populations (and Chinese) start declining seriously. I see a good
future for computer-controlled sailing ships, particularly for bulk items.
(PV) I wonder, with the advance of computer driven "micro-managed"
custom design, whether the result will be not a return
to distributed industrial age style factories, but rather more local
smaller, largely automated manufactories which create individually
specified items,
(KH) Yes, indeed, particularly for those selling to the meta-class
consumer (because their goods will tend to be more expensive than
standardized consumer goods, at least for a period). I foresee
increasingly versatile 3-D printing-type machine tools and controlled
by DNA-type algorithms.
(PV) . . . rather than mass produced identical ones. And of course,
along with this must come more locally produced energy and food,
both necessities which I expect will require a fairly large
footprint on the local real estate, to the point where we may see
them clashing over access to terrain.
(KH) However, I think we'll also see increasing standardization of
mass consumer goods with fewer status fashion differences (and thus
price differences) for the majority of advanced country populations
(increasingly living on welfare and basic incomes). I can't see them
taking to growing local food with any enthusiasm. They'll see
themselves ameliorating their condition much more readily by having
even fewer children than now than by trying to grow food. And yes,
they'll also have difficulty in finding accessible land. Already the
meta-class in England (mainly Conservative) is fighting the (mainly
Conservative) government very fiercely indeed over plans for a more
extensive house building invasion of the Green Belt. I could name at
least a dozen very weighty bodies now who are now fighting the
government tooth and nail, and there's little doubt that they'll win.
Keith
On Sat, 19 Nov 2011, Keith Hudson wrote:
There are several powerful currents which are now conjoining and
carrying all of us along helplessly in advanced countries into a
brand-new era. How powerful they are and will become relative to
one another we can't possibly say. We can only juggle them around
in our heads individually and try to imagine what the new era might
be like in vague outline. But the currents themselves are easy to
identify (in my opinion). They are:
1. Automation continuing apace, already producing in the last 20 or
30 years a surplus in the working population of advanced countries,
mainly so far at the top and the bottom of the adult age range but
will gradually spread upwards from the school-leaver as life-time unemployment;
2. The rising power of the scientific class mainly within
transnational corporations, and a correlated diminution of
credibility of the nation-state political class which is still
overwhelmingly non-scientific despite the 300 years of industrial revolution;
3. A rising demarcation of wealth and income between what can be
called a new meta-class (at present about 20-30% of existing
advanced country populations) and the remainder for whom there's no
hope given our present dysfunctional state education systems;
4. A reduction in family size, and thus indigenous populations, of
advanced countries and, by way of the protection of jobs, a
consequent rise in anti-mass immigration protest (which the
political class is only just waking up to);
5. Increasing urbanization of the masses and a corresponding
diminution in the daily time, space or energy able to be devoted to
new consumer goods (if indeed any uniquely new ones exist any longer);
6. Innovation will increasingly switch from consumer goods to
production and delivery systems. The present composition of GDP
inputs (70% and 30% respectively) is likely to reverse within the
next 50 years; the increase in the standard of living of countries,
regions, cities, localities in the longer-term future will be
better described in terms of the increasing energy efficiency of
the necessary work to sustain them in their varied leisure pursuits
rather than in monetary terms as now measured.
7. Many policies and functions are decreasingly carried out by
nation-states and increasingly by specialized lateral transnational
agencies; the remaining basic functions (e.g. civil protection)
will be increasingly carried out by re-shaped and re-sized governances.
Some sort of picture emerges in my mind and, maybe, one might have
arisen in yours (or you may well dispute some of my projections!).
Meanwhile, and quite separately from the above trends, we'll all
have to experience what is likely to be a catastrophic breakdown in
our present world currency system when governments finally realize
that they can't get out of trouble any longer by printing more
banknotes or inventing more varieties of pseudo currencies (e.g.
special drawing rights [SDRs], troubled asset relief programs
(TARPs), quantitative easing [QE] -- and the most risible one of
them all so far, the European financial stability facility [EFSF]
which, it seems, has died a death before it was able to be born!).
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/11/
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/11/
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