OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
> LITT argues from the premise that surviving companies that > continue to take advantage of automation and robotics may need to be > taxed with something akin to a re-employment tax. Monies collected > would be used to either pay the salaries of new kinds of jobs, jobs > that have not yet manifested in today's society - or perhaps to fund > the technical & cultural education of displaced workers. Some might > cry "foul", that this smells of "socialism". But what of it? > As Deng Xiaoping put it: black cat or white cat, who cares, as long as it catches mice. This LITT system would be a hybrid of today's capitalism and the fully automated, no-economic-system needed distant future. It would be an intermediate system. Our present economic system is also a way station along the road to full automation. If we were to suddenly put it back to what it was before the New Deal, I think it would be catastrophic. On the other hand, if we tried to convert to full-on LITT-type system today, that would be a disaster. We are not capable of anything like the fully automated version in which all of the necessity of life are handed out for free. That will take 100 years. Maybe 200 years. We need to adjust the system step by step to deal with circumstances as they evolve. The right system for 1890 did not work in 1930, and the 1930 version did not work in 1990. Since I the proverbial man who has only a hammer, I see all problems as a nail. From my point of view this is mostly about technology. There is no morally right or morally wrong economic system. There is only a system that works well the machinery of life we had back in 1890 (horses, coal, mostly manual labor, 30% of workforce in agriculture), and another system that works well with the technology we have now. The direction of technology is perfectly clear to me. The ultimate goal is to eliminate human labor and make every good end every service available in unlimited quantities, subject only to demand, and to practical limitations such as the fact that we don't want the entire surface of the Earth covered by black and white televisions. * Our present limitations in material resources and energy are not caused by actual, physical limits or scarce resources. They are caused by ignorance. Ignorance, stupidity and greed. We talk about an "energy crisis" when the sun produces enough energy to supply every person with roughly 4,000 times more energy than the entire human race now consumes. - Jed * In the late 1940s, my mother pointed out the absurdity of straight line social science projections by calculating that the world will soon be knee deep in black and white televisions "if present trends continue." Present trends never continue to extremes. Not in society. Sometimes, natural trends do, resulting in things like supernova explosions.
