Pete, Obviously I believe you are intelligent on this since it basically is my experience beginning with the drug culling in the 1960s by the children of the upper and middle classes, followed by the AIDS epidemic at a time when the homosexual community had become dangerous to itself with anonymous sex. That was followed by a "genetic" blossoming of that population and a middle class " gay marriage" morality replacing the Dionysian "We can have it all" attitude expressed in the 1980s just prior to AIDS. I believe these are not conscious but are a part of our unconscious. Today we are back to the same wild individual versus the community that goes back to the arguments about how to deal with agriculture and the forest. These wild individuals will never be free and the connection that the urban folks desire so much will also never be met because of their paranoia around being "known" in an age of information.
I think your second and third paragraphs are spot on. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete Sent: Monday, August 20, 2012 5:16 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] The article that Sally referred us to Extracting a section... On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote: > But most of the populations of advanced countries are declining > anyway. For the past two generations, ever since the post-WWII > baby-bulge, families have decreased to much less than replacement > sizes. Within two generations from now, populations will be halved; > within three generations, populations will be less than a quarter; > within four generations there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck, > the bulk of the population (what I term the 80-class) will decline > pari passu with the onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way > will have to be made up with welfare payments from governments. I disagree entirely. No country has yet seen an actual decline in population, that I am aware. Certainly lots of regions have, but the national totals still hover at manifestly unsustainable numbers, ...and everybody knows it. Talk to people. Everyone I talk to is just waiting for the other shoe to drop. On a discussion in a random web forum the other day, someone asked "How many are we?", and the unchallenged answer came immediately: "Too many!" People aren't stupid, they know we're courting catastrophe, and they aren't going to breed recklessly in that situation. Everyone has seen the growth curves, they know the numbers, and they can see that this sort of thing doesn't usually end well. However, it is a matter of habituation. People will tend to estimate that a sane population ought to feel like what it was like back when they were small children, and so each generation will have a different sense of what is excess. So, what I expect to happen is at some point there will be a slight decline in populations which will show up at the whole country, and then the whole world, level. This will cause a huge mental sigh of relief, followed shortly by a tiny uptick in the birth rate, so that the total population drop will not amount to more than ten or perhaps fifteen percent below maximum before it levels off, assuming that the long term pathologies to the environment due to human overburden have not yet ripened to the point of inflicting overt impact on our numbers. At this point, I expect that those long term pathologies are going to play the determining role. Each different, unforeseen, presenting a new and different assault which will hack at some portion of the population. Some will be simply the stochastic inevitability of epidemics. You keep a homogeneous population at unsustainable density long enough, and it will be vulnerable to pathogenic culls, not all of which will be controllable by our medical technology. Again, the longer the time scale, the more likely something too tricky to solve will come along. The situation essentially selects for it. Other assaults will arise from our corruption of the un- or underacknowledged necessities of our environment, air water, soil, healthy bacterial populations, etc. I don't expect these events to occur quickly, nor do I expect things like warfare to substantially affect the population total. I do expect that life will go through a fairly long period where we will experience as a planetary species a pretty wretched time, and how long and how bad it will be will be chiefly dependent on how long it takes us to acknowledge the superiority of cooperation over individual struggle. It may be that the population takes a massive dive due to a particularly vicious assault of the type mentioned above, but certainly not due to a massive social neglect of breeding. Barring such a hit, I expect the total population to subside slowly as reality sets in. Where it finally settles will be contingent on how our technology solves each challenge I've outlined above, including those just sketched vaguely. In the shorter medium term of the next 3-400 years, I expect a stepwise downward trend as apparently viable population levels prove unsustainable, due to inability to manage the challenges noted above, and population reduction is recognized as the only available solution. It may be that in a half a millennium or so we will decide that the planet cannot sustain more than 2.5 or 3 billion, or we may devise ways of supporting 8 or 12, or even 30, but with extraordinary technological intervention and considerable energy flows onto and off the planet. At any rate, at each stage along the way, people will tend to breed to the point of filling up the planet to the maximum regarded as viable, and I expect there will be a permanent struggle to hold the numbers to what is seen as desireable at any time. At any time ahead, with the planet at what is then generally perceived as a safe and manageable population level, there will never be a problem keeping the population level up, only with keeping it down, and the latter problem may result in a permanent undercurrent of nastiness. It would seem unlikely that managing population numbers would not be combined with some form of eugenic practice in such a world. Each child born would be expected to have something about it which justified its right to life in place of others whose would-be parents were thwarted. -Pete On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote: > The article that Sally referred us to ("Skilled Work, Without the > Worker", John Markoff, NYT, 19 August 12) was eloquent on job > destruction but only hinted at another, equally significant by-product > of the increasing use of robotics. This is that robots are becoming > increasingly versatile. If suitably programmed, they can be instantly > switched from one job to another. (Mention was made of one robot which > could switch between four distinctly different > operations.) Items can be custom-made. The mass consumer goods and > services market will also be destroyed in due course. > > Which, from the point of view of the very rich and the supportive > specialisms around them (what I call the 20-class), is just as well. > Mass production of standard goods and services is becoming > increasingly risky. Competition between ever-larger corporations in > every field is not only becoming fiercer, profit margins (the future > source of investment finance) are becoming narrower. The Apple > iPhone4S might well have a profit margin of 50% or so at the present > time but, within five years or so, we can be certain that competition > from Samsung, Matsushita, Google and others will drive it well below > 10%, perhaps nearer to the 1-2% profit margins of most personal > computer manufacturers. Given an innovative tweak by another > manufacturer to its own smartphone and Apple could easily go out of existence, much as threatens Nokia at the present time. > > Being a more mature industry, what's happening to cars at the present > time is an even more instructive pointer to the future. On the one > hand, we have the mass production of cars by no more than about a > dozen large manufacturers in the world with, at best, only modest > profit margins of around 5-7%, more usually 2-3%, and sometimes 0% > (being kept alive by government subsidies). On the other hand, we have > the recent burgeoning of many luxury types of cars (for the 20-class) > which are either brand new in design (e.g. Tesla, McLaren) or are > revivals of some of the hand-made brands of the past (e.g. Porsche, > Aston Martin). They are made in surgically clean workshops with robots > dancing up and down the line and with hardly a worker to be seen. > There are more than > 20 luxury car-makers already and undoubtedly there'll be many more. > But they won't be competing on price, only on customers' personal > tastes. Later, they'll be competing on the basis of how versatile > their robots can be programmed, even down to making customers' own > designs as well as their own brand. > > One question will be raised immediately: "If robots are to take over, > and there's to be no future for mass production then there'll be no > future for jobs for most of the population." Exactly! But most of the > populations of advanced countries are declining anyway. For the past > two generations, ever since the post-WWII baby-bulge, families have > decreased to much less than replacement sizes. Within two generations > from now, populations will be halved; within three generations, > populations will be less than a quarter; within four generations > there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck, the bulk of the > population (what I term the 80-class) will decline pari passu with the > onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way will have to be made up with welfare payments from governments. > > The other questions will be: "If there's no labour (80-class) for the > 20-class to exploit where will profits (for future investment) come > from? How will an economy exist at all?" The answer is that economic > development has never come from labour as such. Slave labour never > gave way to paid labour solely because of the sentiments of William > Wilberforce or the Quakers, but because the energy of paid labour was > more efficient than slave labour. Paid labour is giving way to > robotics because the energy of robots is more efficiently expended than the muscular (or mental) energy of the routine jobs of humans. > The future economy of a 20-class is perfectly viable so long as > efficiency savings are made between one generation of robots and the next. > > Keith > > Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com > _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
