Craig <[email protected]> wrote:
> Group A wants everyone to pitch in and provide a basic income for people. > > Group B doesn't believe in this method and wants to opt out. > > Now if we follow the plan proposed by Group B, then everyone can get > what they want. . . . This is a technological imperative. It is the only way we will be able to live when robots and computers make human labor worthless. You cannot opt out of the world as it is shaped by technology. Today you cannot live without automobiles, electricity, telephones, the Internet and so on. Yes, there are groups such as the Amish who hold some parts of technology at arm's length, but even they cannot escape from it completely. I am saying that you cannot have the benefits of robots without also accepting the society and economy they will shape. Our present technologies calls for a gigantic, expensive infrastructure outside the house. This is both public, with highways and airports, and private, with telephone poles, fiber optic cables, gas pipelines. Before 1900 this sort of external infrastructure hardly existed. Most buildings were private. Outside the house or outside the town limits there were only rudimentary structures, and only a small fraction of the GDP was devoted to them. Docks and railroads were the first gigantic external infrastructure. Much else followed. Most of our money nowadays goes to pay for things we do not own, and in many cases we never see, such as sewers, water treatment plants, and nuclear power plants. This is not socialism. It is how our present technology works. It is the only way we can have the benefits of clean water and electricity. No one "forces" you to pay for these things, but nearly everyone does pay for them, and no one considers this a limitation of freedom. That's absurd. In the future we may all have decentralized, self-contained power generation and sewage treatment. Our material goods may come from Clarke's "replicator" machines -- souped-up 3-D printers. We may not need a gigantic infrastructure. But we need one now, and must also have an economic system that fits it. We cannot go back to the small government or the low tax levels of 1800, or 1900. Fifty years from now we will have robots everywhere, and we must also have an economic system that works with them. You will not be able to "opt out" unless you want like Amish people -- and very few people want to do that. I recall a story about Henry Ford and Charles Kettering. Kettering invented the automobile self-starter, which replaced the hand-crank. Ford said to him, "I am not going to equip my cars with these. I'll stick with the hand crank." Kettering replied: "You will equip your cars with self-starters. It isn't your choice." He meant it was a technological imperative. No law was needed to enforce this. No one "decided" that all cars would have self-starters. Once the technology was invented, nothing could stop it from replacing the hand-crank. Henry Ford was the most powerful man in the automotive industry, but he could no more stop the self-starter than a new-hire assembly line worker could have. Anyone who wanted to stay in the automobile industry had to use it. The same is true of every other major inventions. No person and no institution could have "stopped" or "slowed down" personal computers after 1980, or the Internet after 1990, or -- if Rossi or someone else ever introduces it -- a practical form of cold fusion sometime in the future. It will not be something you can "opt out of." You will have no choice, because no other source of energy will be available. The oil companies and wind-turbine makers will go bankrupt. I am also reminded of Trotsky's grim words: "you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." You cannot opt out of history. - Jed
