Jones Beene writes:
"More than anything else, I think this video shows how combining available mass-produced technologies can produce surprising results - now - no 'breakthrough' needed."
Yup. Sometimes when you combine mundane, existing technologies you come up with something revolutionary. The Internet is a good example.
"Robotics is on the way - and it will arrive faster than most of us realize. The average manufacturing factory, warehouse, even farm of 2010 will likely be populated by mostly robots - with the human jobs being re-programmers and repair mechanics - IOW higher paying than the jobs that were lost.
A larger question is: If you convert 300 minimum wage jobs to 50 decent jobs w/high pay and some sense of worth, how do you come out ahead, considering the plight of the other 250 whose macjobs were lost?"
That question was first posed by Lord Byron in 1812, in response to the Luddites. It not been adequately addressed yet.
"Economists will say, and I believe that they are correct but in some unknown time-frame, that *eventually* having the added productivity and efficiency will result in demand for 5 extra factories to produce more and more goods... so *eventually* we will have converted ALL those 300 macjobs to decent jobs. All it takes is capital."
I would like to think so, but I doubt it. There is a limit to how much work needs to be done. There is a limit the number of goods and services a normal person can consume, or wants to consume. Of course there will be plenty of work at first. We must clean up the environmental mess left by the 20th century, build nice houses for everyone, educate all children, teach everyone on earth how to speak English fluently, colonize the moon, and terraform Mars. But after a while, 99% of that work will be done by robots. Scientific research will also employ many robots, but there is an infinite amount left to learn, so hypothetically we might employ 5 billion people doing experiments, with an army of 100 billion robots helping them. All 105 billion of them could study the H2O molecule, E. coli, or metal hydrides without ever exhausting the questions and mysteries these objects give rise to. But that will not work because only one person in a thousand has the skill or the desire to do research. Suggesting that we will all become scientists is like saying we will all become Olympic athletes, or dentists, or (God forbid) lawyers. Most of us couldn't, and wouldn't even if we could.
I have heard predictions that we may evolve into a society in which 80% of the people work in some form of entertainment, ranging from television and amusement parks to on-line interactive Internet dramas. I, for one, could never consume enough "entertainment" to keep my share of the economy afloat. One hour of television per day is the most I could stand.
In the end, I agree with Arthur Clarke, who thinks that communism ended in 1989 and capitalism will not last much longer. Eventually, we will have to find a way to distribute goods and services to everyone for free. The day must come when things such as food, a nice apartment, unlimited college and postgraduate education, a month-long vacation on Mars, and high-speed Internet access are considered the birthright of every person. Everyone will take as much of these things as they want, the way we take packets of sugar in a restaurant, or a ride on an escalator. We do not stop to pay a toll on an escalator because the cost is so small it is not worth bothering with. Someday, people will step aboard aircraft and spacecraft and travel across continents and between planets with as little thought as we travel on escalators, and no one will bother collecting a ticket fee.
Some people say we will never be able to do this because we cannot devise an economic system that would allocate resources equitably. Everyone will want the good apartments overlooking Central Park. Everyone will want to eat filet mignon. Some people cannot imagine an economic system that is not based on trading human labor for goods. I say that if we devise machines to grow food, and machines that can drive cars, build houses, and perform surgery better than humans -- as I am sure we will -- than we can also come up with a new economic system, that will keep progress from ruining the lives of millions of people and destroying society. Our engineering skills may be ahead of our economic creativity, but we have changed our economy in the past, and we can do it again.
Ultimately, the most difficult problem for most people will be: What do you do with yourself? How do you defines yourself and your own worth? Today, when you ask someone, "who are you?" most people tell you their job. People say: "I am a teacher" or "I drive a taxi." People who lose their jobs or retire are often heartbroken and rudderless, not only because of the money, but because of the loss of self-esteem. When there is no more work left to do, and the whole human race takes a permanent vacation, we will have define our identities some other way. This is not our problem, and it never will be. But our great-great-grandchildren will have to deal with it. As usual, Clarke saw it coming decades ago. He described the "replicator" -- the ultimate machine that instantly, automatically fabricates any product you want, at no cost:
"It is certainly fortunate that the replicator, if it can ever be built at all, lies far in the future, at the end of many social revolutions. Confronted by it, our own culture would collapse speedily into sybaritic hedonism, followed immediately by the boredom of absolute satiety. Some cynics may doubt if any society of human beings could adjust itself to unlimited abundance and the lifting of the curse of Adam -- a curse which may be a blessing in disguise.
Yet in every age, a few men have known such freedom, and not all of them have been corrupted by it. Indeed, I would define a civilized man as one who can be happily occupied for a lifetime even if he has no need to work for a living. This means that the greatest problem of the future is civilizing the human race; but we know that already."
- Profiles of the Future, chapter 13, "Aladdin's Lamp"
- Jed
