I don't care what you said, I simply don't believe high-tech will bring us more free time only more people will get fired just to preserve more money. Sorry I don't believe in high-tech anymore.
Why do you suppose a small number of people will continue to work 40-hour jobs while everyone else is unemployed? Since the mechanization of farming we do not see a small cadre of farmers continuing to work 100-hour weeks.
People who are working need customers to buy their goods and services, or they won't be able to keep working. It benefits everyone to spread the work around instead of concentrating it on the shoulders of a handful of people who continue working to the standards of the previous paradigm--and have no customers.
As I said, the jobs of the future will probably occupy us for ten hours a week, or less.
You have totally misunderstood me. I don't think the future will necessarily involve doom or gloom. I'm optimistic that our future lives will be the opposite of what they are now: boring, repetitive, hopeless, uninspiring, bleak, without rewarding activity or connection to our fellow man.
So sorry about your life. Mine has been quite the opposite since I was born in 1943. The only people I've known whose lives approach the model you propose are those who have never taken charge of their own lives, starting with not bothering to study in school when they were children. As adults they proudly proclaim that they have "beaten the system" when in fact all they are doing is hiding out at the very bottom of it, where a prosperous and generous society keeps them from starving or freezing to death.
We will live closer to other people and have to get along with them out of necessity.
On the contrary, once the stranglehold of the energy industry is broken and everyone who can telecommute from home is allowed to, many people will happily migrate to non-urban areas with considerable distance between themselves and their neighbors. The trend of population concentrating in cities (our species recently reached the tipping point at which more than half of us live in cities) will probably reverse.
We will have to make things with our hands and our skills.
I see you've never heard of CAD/CAM. It is now practical to "manufacture" a single object without need for an assembly line.
We will have to recall forgotten trades.
Where do you come up with this stuff? Look around you and you'll see that civilization is moving in the exact opposite direction. New information-intensive occupations are created every day, while the old ones are being taken over by software. Five thousand years after the invention of the technology of writing, literacy is finally on the verge of becoming universal because many people communicate in writing more than in speech. If you can call vowel-less 140-character sound bites "literacy."
All in all, it will be a better, less artificial life. I look forward to it!
Yuck! Goddess save me from the retrogression of civilization--which, BTW, is entirely "artificial."
On the other hand, it appears that you, never having experienced anything other than a life defined by 50+ years of cheap easily obtained energy, have the absurd belief that this temporary state of affairs can go on indefinitely!
The sun produces more energy than we can ever use. The technology to capture it is unremarkable. The obstacles to building the necessary collectors are entirely political.
You have an almost religious faith in science to be able to create the technology we need to sustain the unsustainable for ever and ever.
Ever since the first pre-sapiens hominoid discovered how to knap flint and scrape the leftover meat off the bones left behind by the predators, several million years ago, we have constantly been inventing new technology--even without science. There's no reason to suspect that we'll stop.
During most of my life our scariest problem was overpopulation, and no one realized that science and technology would solve that. The prosperity that industrial and post-industrial technology have spread throughout the world, even to the shrinking benighted regions where despots keep their people poor and ignorant, has turned out to be the most effective contraceptive. The world can support the predicted population peak of ten billion (the still-underpopulated Western Hemisphere can produce enough food to feed twice that many people and still restore our rainforests) before it finally begins to shrink.
My belief is that trains are good, cars are bad. It's not the speeds, which are similar, but the efficiency. (And the consumerism that is largely the purview of the personal automobile)
One-fourth of America's petroleum consumption goes directly into commuting, and the second-order effects such as nannies and fast food may make that one-third. When people are allowed to work at home, speed won't matter. Except for a handful of professions like psychiatry and diplomacy that will probably always require face-to-face communication, people will only travel for recreation or socializing. Speed won't matter.
As for consumerism, you must not be reading your memos. Malls are closing down as people do more and more of their shopping on Amazon and E-bay.
Paradigm, schmaradigm! These buzzwords are not natural law.
Nonetheless the history of civilization has been a series of paradigm shifts: a total restructuring of human life requiring us to relate to nature, each other, and ourselves in a new way. Agriculture, cities, bronze, iron, industry, electronics: each new paradigm shattered the previous one. By attempting to predict what life will be like in 200 years you invite the comparison to your counterpart in 1812 smugly insisting that he knew what our lives would be like today, even having seen the steam engine invented: a nation of illiterate farmers, augmented by a little mercantilism.
This information age of yours must piggyback on a consumer society which is based on cheap energy.
There appears to be enough fossil fuel to keep the status quo for several more generations, even if harvesting it will make some messes. Capitalism will continue its post-industrial collapse, so the few remaining corporations will not have the critical mass that puts them in control of national governments. Then, while there's still time, alternative power sources will be developed, using the much more efficient technologies of the next century.
We cannot sustain a society solely on trading bits and bytes.
You sound like Baron Max. We surely can! We will still be producing, schlepping, selling and buying food, housing, clothes, appliances and everything else, not to mention services. But the information sector will continue to grow.
I've heard it all before, techno-grandiosity combined with a star-trek future where nothing costs any money.
I didn't say that nothing would cost any money. I'm just predicting that per-capita income will make another quantum increase as it does after every paradigm shift, so all of these things will be affordable to the vast majority of people.
But of course we have to take into account the virtualization of goods and services, as they become more information-intensive. Information is qualitatively different from all previous types of goods and services because once it is created it can be duplicated almost literally for free.
This is, of course, one of the defining attributes of a
paradigm shift.
If you haven't noticed, we don't have the capital to give all our citizens health care, much less build anything giant in space.
Of course we do! It's just not distributed in a pattern that lends itself to doing those things. Am I the only person here who didn't sleep through my economics classes?
Energy. Trucks and international shipping doesn't run on nuclear power.
No, but even large vehicles can run on electricity. As for the gigantic ocean-going vehicles that couldn't carry large enough batteries, there's no reason that the transmission of power by microwaves that will be the infrastructure for the orbiting solar collectors cannot be just as easily deployed on ships to drive their huge electric engines. Heck, even trucks and trains could use it to get around the recharge problem.
Not that we have the nuclear plants anyway, or get them within the next 10-20 years.
As I said, we've got at least a hundred-year supply of fossil fuel left, although it will be more expensive to access. We can spend that hundred years:
- Building the orbiting solar collectors and the microwave receiver network.
- Building more nuclear plants and letting our descendants deal with the nuclear waste issue.
- Wringing our hands and insisting that the world is going to hell.
What are you smoking and can I get some? Electricity can't just be sent to other countries through the mail! There is no infrastructure to support your grandiose schemes, and little capital to start them.
It's a big project that will take a while. The infrastructure can be built by all those unemployed people in those countries. The capital will come from outside. Perhaps the capitalists of the developed world can invest in something tangible, instead of the derivatives whose market is so volatile that its perturbations can affect an entire national economy. As I keep saying, at some point they're going to have to resume investing in projects that employ people, or no one will be able to buy their goods and services.
That is false. The Greeks were quite advanced, they even had mechanical computers. Then the Middle Ages happened.
The Dark Ages were strictly a European phenomenon. The Middle East was booming. Arab scholars preserved the wisdom of our own ancients and moved it forward. There's a reason words like "algebra" start with the Arabic definite article. China had never tried to make the dramatic discoveries that were going on at the other end of Eurasia and their civilization plodded along at a slow but steady pace during that era.
Nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is inevitable.
Except human nature. We've been transcending the external nature of the universe and our own internal nature for millions of years and we show no signs of stopping. There's a sort of Maslow's Hierarchy for our entire species. We keep rising to the next step, when no one even knows what's up there.
You people who are young enough to watch the Post-Industrial Revolution play out are in for some great times. As for me, I've been deliriously happy due to merely one aspect of it: recorded music. My ancestors were lucky if a traveling troupe came through their neck of the woods two or three times a year. The rest of the time they had to be satisfied with the pianist in the tavern on Saturday night and the church choir on Sunday morning--if they lived close enough to town to even go, considering that many people didn't have horses and wagons. I get to listen to professionally composed and performed music 24/7. As far as I'm concerned, the rest of life is just details.
And it all depended on energy. The days of cheap energy are coming to an end.
Our descendants will certainly live through some interesting times if:
- We don't start building those orbiting solar collectors and
- We don't build the nuclear plants that will get us through the next few centuries while our lame-brained governments fight among themselves instead of cooperating to build those collectors.
Sure civilization will continue, but it will be smaller in scale, more local, less frenzied, and the possibility of political turmoil as people like you realize they have been promised a lie is very real.
Only in countries like the USA and Greece where everyone assumes they'll be rich because someone else will make it happen.
Probably we can do just as well with concentrating thermal solar systems here on the ground. . . .
Even with improved solar cell technology, we can't cover enough of the earth's surface to power the entire planet.
. . . . at a tiny fraction of the costs. . . .
Much of those costs will be labor so it balances out. Fuel to get the materials into high orbit, that's a different story. But the answer is to get serious about space elevators.
. . . .and without the insane risks associated with such a scheme.
What risks?
That's not gonna happen - nuclear is highly unpopular these days, what with Fukushima and all.
People are both selfish and fickle. When their homes start to brown out they'll be screaming to put Chernobyl and Fukushima back on line, and build new ones. Of course they'll pay for dragging their feet because it takes a couple of decades for a nuclear powerplant to go from conception to operation.
The stampede is in the other direction - towards coal (which is actually much worse from the green perspective, but hey).
Yeah, the planet may get pretty dirty for a while. Oh well, the market will be wide open for some smart young kids with a new planetary-cleaning technology.
I guess you're addressing some hypothetical distant future wherein we've run out of natural gas and coal?
It will happen eventually. Since the evolution of mushrooms, who have the enzyme to digest lignin, trees no longer lie around for millions of years slowly fossilizing into fuel.
But, that won't happen. We'll render the planet uninhabitable from greenhouse gas emissions long before we run out of coal and natural gas to burn for electricity.
Well let's hope that you and I aren't the only people who understand that, so someone will start working on an alternative. In any case they'll reach a point of miserable equilibrium with greenhouse gases, at which the prospect of building new nuclear plants will start to look pretty nice.
Except those countries don't have the technological infrastructure to build such things, nor do they have the fuel, or the means to mine and process it, nor do they have the electricity export infrastructure. Those countries can barely feed themselves, let alone build and operate large-scale, high-tech power generation facilities. You ever seen an aerial picture of North Korea at night? It's a big black expanse, because they don't have enough juice to run the lights at night.
China will simply exercise the right it's been reserving to annex North Korea the way it annexed Tibet. End of problem.
Or were you positing those states as becoming private playgrounds for some international cartel of nuclear power investors? Also hard to see, frankly.
Just China. They take what they want and don't care how the locals feel about it.
But I can think of a country or two with very lax environmental controls, a rabidly pro-industrialism government, and sufficient infrastructure and technology to actually do such a thing (still no fuel, though). Probably you can guess who I'm thinking of.
By then the Industrial Era will be over and the megacorporations that ruled the industrial nations will be in the history books. Some new type of entity will be created by government to replace the corporations, which they created to replace the aristocracy. They always need an intermediate layer of quasi-government to distract us with their shenanigans, so we don't notice the somewhat more opaque shenanigans of the government itself.
This seems to underplay certain extended, trying circumstances. Like the Dark Ages, for example.
As I pointed out, the Dark Ages were strictly a local phenomenon. The civilizations in the Middle East, India and China were not affected. And the civilizations in Central and South America were not even aware of it.
