Category Archives: View

View 821 Saturday, April 26, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I had intended to work on the acknowledgments of the California Sixth Grade Reader, but I discovered that LASFS is celebrating the 4000^th meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, and they had scheduled me, Niven, Davit Gerrold, and Craig Miller to do a panel on LASFS and pro writers, and had brought in Tim Powers from San Bernardino to talk, and as usually happens when Tim and Serena come to town we put together a dinner. The result ate up the day, so I’ll have to get to the acknowledgements tomorrow or Monday. That has become my highest priority project. It should have been out the door a long time ago.

Last time we had an essay by Eric Gilmer on the future of work, with my comments. Please read both if you haven’t already, or if you read them but forgot what was said.

The Future of "Work"

Hi Jerry,

I found Eric Gilmer’s short article quite interesting. We certainly do live in interesting times. For the most part, I think most generations have. It’s just that today, the details of our interesting times change just about as fast as we buy new shoes.

Eric makes a number of interesting points, but the one I’d like to focus on is the notion of work. I’m sure you would agree that what most of us consider work would look nothing like what most considered work in the Middle Ages or Pharoanic times in Egypt. Each era had tools, but those tools enabled the muscles of men to work more efficiently at producing the goods they needed to survive. They certainly survived better than those who lived prior to the Stone Age.

We seem to be living in the culmination of that process. Each generation since the earliest man learned to use a rock to break open a hard shelled nut or a stick to defend himself has made improvements in the tools humans use to survive. Even in the early Americas, some tools changed more rapidly than people could be educated to take advantage of them, however. Today, as Eric points out, most of our tools are driven by computers and we are at the beginning of a time when our tools will improve themselves as they seek to do the jobs once performed by men. They will be more efficient, quicker, cheaper, and the goods they produce will be endlessly varied, inexpensive, and even uniquely crafted for each individual’s taste. Once this occurs, what then of Man?

During my college years, I remember reading of a sort of war of the Scribes Guild vs the Printers Guild in one or more of the states of Europe. Things sounded very similar to Union vs Manufacturer debates of today. Printers/Manufacturers: "We will make more knowledge/goods/services available to the people." Scribes/Unions: "You are destroying jobs for the sake of money." What neither side could see at the dawn of the printing press was the huge shift that took place in Man’s relationship to the world as more and more people gained more knowledge from the books and pamphlets made available by the printing press. Much of what we have today was made available by that wide spreading curtain of knowledge that helped move Man up and away from the poverty and misery of his ancestors. Like the printing press, however, the invention significantly preceded the gains humanity would reap from it. It took time for what the printing press brought to be felt in human society.

Today, we are still in early development of our "printing press".

Just as with the printing press, computers will result in the fall of nations (perhaps already have), the elimination of jobs, and the expansion of what it means to be human. Today, entire countries and economies can do quite well with 20-25% of its young people not "gainfully employed". That does not mean they do not work. They just do not work in what has traditionally been called work. Just like the printing press and many other inventions throughout the course of human history, computers will redefine the meaning of work, leave many behind during the years of its development into a stable and ubiquitous tool, and cause individuals to develop entirely new ways of thinking about the universe and Man’s place in it.

In the future, just like we who are in the future our grandparents made possible, work will mean something different. I will probably not mean 9-5, mass migration of populations at the beginning/end of the day to centers of work. Humans may very well do their "work" in their sleep leaving the entire day for leisure and the arts. Some humans will work harder than others. Some, perhaps most, will do no "work" at all. What that sort of world will be like I can only dimly see, but my multitasking, quick thinking, and deeply knowledgeable through their cell phones grandkids will make happen. It will be horrible and it will be glorious, just like every major change before it.

Braxton S. Cook

It is certain that in modern industrial societies well advanced into the Computer Revolution the nature and meaning of work will change. Meanwhile, we move toward a society in which an increasing number of citizens of the Republic have no contribution to make: they are literally proletariat, persons who contribute only their progeny. Now there will always be some people of this classification, but it is unlikely that those who do “work” and whose contributions are absolutely necessary to keep the high productivity system of robots and tools running and producing the means to support everyone will choose to submit to being governed by the much larger number who contribute nothing, and who seek increases in their entitlements. Note that in the United States, we define as poverty an income and amenities – having teeth well past age 70, a fair amount of health care, the possibility of transportation at fairly rapid speeds, durable clothing, other such things taken for granted – would have been considered wild riches beyond the dreams of avarice for most of human history. Poverty in the US is still wealth in most of the world.

How long this can continue is a matter for concern. If Moore’s Law continues to operate, productivity will increase monotonically and perhaps exponentially. There will be lots of goods to distribute. Perhaps stability can be bought with the surplus value, not of labor as Marx thought, but of capital – robots – even thought Marx based much of his analysis on the premise that “Capital is barren:.” What that meant is that the building of machines used about as many resources as the machines would contribute to the economy. That wasn’t really true in his time, and became increasingly less true as the industrial and then the computer revolutions developed, and is certainly not true now. In agriculture we have moved from more than 80% of the population being required to work in agriculture to feed the population in the early Twentieth Century, to the point where far more food, both per capita and in absolute quantity, is produced by fewer than 10% of the population; and this is a permanent change.

Manufacturing is undergoing a similar transformation. In both cases capital was hardly barren. Productivity increases steadily. Fewer and fewer workers are required. This continues.

And our schools continue to be unwilling or unable to train people to do work that someone will pay to have done.

The Future of Work and Everything Else Part 2

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

In my last message to you I believe the tone I set may have been somewhat dour. Ignorance in the face of great change does that to me, but I am, nonetheless an optimist; that special brand of mental illness that allows me to ignore the capacity of Humanity to inject every favorable situation with the politics of greed, fear, race and religion and to believe there is reason to hope. I would not be fully representing my thoughts on the subject if I didn’t mention what I believe to be some of the more hopeful possibilities in the coming years, or at the very least a few of the highlights.

I can imagine a world that has defeated old age and disease; where we don’t lose our best and most experienced minds after a few short decades, a world where even our finite resources on earth are adequate due to super efficient manufacturing. If Humanity can achieve something like energy security (I won’t discuss the seemingly permanent 30 year horizon for fusion energy) than it is just possible that the coming decades will see greater peace and prosperity than at any time in our history. Every generation won’t have to re-learn the old lessons…imagine what that might be like: Humanity can keep it’s wisdom and not lose it to the grave every three score and ten.

The development of a permanent Human presence in the solar system will be greatly aided by the advances in materials science, energy storage and medical therapies that can correct the health issues surrounding prolonged existence in micro-gravity, or increased exposure to radiation. Additive manufacturing will make colonies cheaper to establish and more robust in the face of prohibitively expensive supply runs from Earth. longer lifespans may offer the potential of travel to the nearest stars even without an FTL drive. With durable, able robots as our Assistants Humanity may be able to achieve goals that we all discard with adulthood, or never consider due to the constraints of life as we know it. We could build a world without want, without illness and work for goals now unattainable due to our short lives.

Regardless of my optimism (which has yet to make it’s way to the DSM), I am not so far gone as to believe in Utopia. Nothing ever created has been shared evenly (presuming that would be a good thing) and no good thing has ever been developed that has not also been abused, or has more…complicated ramifications.

For instance; human existence without ageing and death will see a generation that has never (or rarely) known loss. Medical technology that cures every disease, heals every wound and factories that produce endless, cheap goods will produce a generation that has no knowledge of pain or want. I don’t know about you, but on the rare occasion that I meet someone who has been ‘blessed’ with a trouble free life I have always sensed something missing about them. They seem somehow incomplete.

I believe there is a potential problem with a generation that knows nothing about pain or struggle. Children that never grow up cannot drive a civilization, at least not one that I want to be a part of. There must be an answer for this just as urgently as the need for a new business model. Pain has been a constant companion of Human existence and is our great teacher. Pain teaches us compassion and humility. Pain makes us grow up, forces us to look inward. Take pain away from a Human and I will show you someone who will never attain their potential.

As for a new business model, I will defer adding to this discussion. Business of the future in light of our new knowledge and abilities is beyond my training. I hope abler minds will weigh in. The importance of it can’t be understated: Business drives progress. Profit drew adventurers to the New World and it will be profit that draws them to Space. But where is the profit of the future? What will have value in an era that has banished scarcity? Land, of course, but what else? And if there was a ‘thing of value’ that had not been eliminated by cheap manufacturing, who could purchase it? I’m not asking these questions as a prelude to answering them. I’m asking these questions because I have no idea and I hope to Hell someone else does.

I will conclude by saying that I don’t believe every answer must come before the change. Much if not most of the coming changes will occur just as all other changes have; unconsciously and by a combination of capable, pivotal figures as well as the unthinking reflexive nature of Humanity in aggregate. I think that is the very definition of a chaotic system. The future, then may be different than the sum of it’s parts and is likely only to be understood in retrospect. So when future is past we can look at it again and ponder how close to the mark we hit.

Thank you for your continued patience with my musings. Again, I apologize for my errors and oversights. I want to contribute to the discussion, not monopolize it, however, so I invite criticism and new ideas.

With respect,

Eric Gilmer

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 821 Thursday, April 24, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

It has been a busy day and I got some work done. I’ll do more tomorrow.

Here is an essay by a reader that is well worth your time:

the future of work and everything else

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

Some time ago I sent a missive to you on the subject of the future of work. If the subject has not run it’s course, I would like to ruminate with more care than last time.

The question is thus: What would a society that requires 50 percent or fewer of it’s population to run it look like? Personally, I think 50 percent is an optimistic figure given the advances in computer technology, but I won’t beat that drum too much. Let’s say half of everyone born has insufficient intelligence and potential to serve society in any meaningful way. These poor souls we relegate to the status of ‘irrelevant’. Those fortunate enough to be blessed with good genetics and make favorable choices in life (don’t become artists or philosophy majors) will have a role…potentially.

Of course, what we are really asking is ‘what will the next 50(40, 30, 20) years look like." and this question has been asked 50 years ago by luminaries and laypersons alike and with very little to distinguish between them in the area of predictive accuracy. But in the words of Kenneth Boulding, "What can we really know about the future? Precious little! But that little is precious."

We know for a fact that a trend exists in Western societies that is eliminating roles in favor of automated systems. These roles range from factory workers to junior lawyers. The technological sophistication that permits the replacement of Human workers is not standing still; presumably more and more Human roles will fall into the category of, ‘cheaper to perform with a computer/robot’. The cost to a firm or an industry of course, is not necessarily the same as a cost to society. I’m not a socialist…I don’t believe in penalizing ability or shackling industry. The process of replacing work with invention is not new after all, but our previous experience is not going to be our future experience and I will tell you why I think so.

Until quite recently, most invention created more work than it replaced, or at the very least supported a change of environment that was conducive to more Human involvement rather than less. I won’t debate this. I’m not sure I would win, but it seems that the printing press replaced scribes but helped create the modern era and it’s plethora of previously unimagined roles.

Now, however, we are finally creating man plus, only it is not a man. Where before we created tools to solve specific questions, i.e.; how do we print many copies of books without requiring an army of monks to transcribe them? or, how do we facilitate the production of goods beyond what the craftsman/apprentice model can produce? Now we are creating a pre-cursor tool; a tool that answers every question; How do we do ‘X’, answer: use an intelligent robot. It doesn’t matter what ‘X’ is, the answer is the same. No new Human roles will emerge from this paradigm because ‘X’ will always be ‘not-Human’.

Alright, let’s assume that in the early stages 50 percent of the available workers will still be needed. They will be needed to make executive decisions, for oversight and overall planning, perhaps even some limited software engineering and whatever other role that software and robotics haven’t developed the flexibility and sophistication to replace. I can’t believe that the current economic model could support this, but it will certainly try. Will the current model shatter or transform? Will political instability, grinding poverty and ossification of a new social class system become our future (presumably just prior to total collapse), or will some new system replace it?

What are some of the other factors that will likely mold our future? Additive manufacturing for a start. In it’s more mature form additive manufacturing becomes molecular manufacturing and drives down the price of ‘things’ to effectively zero. Imagine a nano-factory where you have a hopper at one end with a colony of nano disassemblers into which you shovel debris of any kind and at the other end is an output of any particular device you want, provided the raw elements on hand are what is required for it’s manufacture. This may not be so far distant as many suspect and certainly in the mean time additive manufacturing will drive down the price of manufactured goods dramatically.

Another likely development will be the development of control over the aging process. Once thought of as centuries away if ever, now most in the industry argue over whether it will be possible in 20 years or under a century. Since most of the most dramatic advances in microscopy have been developed only in the last 3-5 years I think sooner rather than later. There are still conservatives in this field, but I suspect that they pander to the peer review and grants infrastructure, rather than any objective assessment of the field.

And this brings me to an important point: Advances are progressing many times faster than institutions that exist to monitor/regulate. The economy and political systems of today are no different than they were decades ago, at least not substantively so. The technology which is set to tip everything on it’s head is simply running ahead of our civilization’s demonstrated ability to adapt.

This may not be as dire a prediction as seems implicit, for society changes only when it must and never before has so much been required of it. Since there has never been a time like now and the coming decades, it still remains to be seen if adaptation is possible for our existing system of governance and economics.

So back to the beginning and still no answer to the basic question. In fact I seem to be further from an answer than when I started. I simply don’t know what a society that does not need that many people to work would look like or how it would function. When I was a lad I wanted to be Jack Holloway on Zarathustra, or fight for a chance on Tanith or if I’m lucky on Sparta, or ship out with Col. Falkenberg. Alas, in spite of the great and terrible changes on the horizon, still no FTL to propel us to new homes and frontiers. If the experiment fails here, no back-up somewhere else. Whatever the near future looks like, humanity is going to know what obsolescence feels like.

Thank you for putting up with my near endless rambling. I hope it adds rather than detracts from the discussion and that my many omissions, errors and oversights will be forgiven.

With respect,

Eric Gilmer

And all that assumes that it will continue to be stable. But I note that the rules for college debate are no longer in vogue: “F—the rules. F—the time. I will talk as long as I like.” The rules change, and the very notion of an orderly society is denigrated.

The center cannot hold. That seems awfully true.

Perhaps the thingmaker will make enough things to distract everyone. And surely someone will still be needed? Hope spring eternal. 

Marx pronounced that capital is barren – that is, it took more labor to produce and maintain capital investments than they generated.  He came to this conclusion from examining industry and commerce as he saw it in the 1840’s, particularly in Thuringia, and perhaps it was an accurate observation for its time and place; but clearly that is no longer true.  In Marx’s time 80% and more were devoted to farming and food production.  Now the percentage of laborers required to see that a modern society is fed is well under 10%, and if you ignore the boutique markets it is less.  And as the robots get smarter, they take less supervision.

And again I really urge those interested in robots and the future to invest the time to read Freefall from the beginning. You will enjoy it, and it won’t make sense if  you skip to the end. Start at the beginning and go to the end.  I’ve done that twice now.  Worth it.          http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

Written in 1919

Nightmare Number Three

Stephen Vincent Benet

We had expected everything but revolt
And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking–
But there’s no dice in that now.
I’ve heard fellows say
They must have planned it for years and maybe they did.
Looking back, you can find little incidents here and there,
Like the concrete-mixer in Jersey eating the wop
Or the roto press that printed ‘Fiddle-dee-dee!’
In a three-color process all over Senator Sloop,
Just as he was making a speech. The thing about that
Was, how could it walk upstairs? But it was upstairs,
Clicking and mumbling in the Senate Chamber.
They had to knock out the wall to take it away
And the wrecking-crew said it grinned.
It was only the best
Machines, of course, the superhuman machines,
The ones we’d built to be better than flesh and bone,
But the cars were in it, of course . . .
and they hunted us
Like rabbits through the cramped streets on that Bloody Monday,
The Madison Avenue busses leading the charge.
The busses were pretty bad–but I’ll not forget
The smash of glass when the Duesenberg left the show-room
And pinned three brokers to the Racquet Club steps
Or the long howl of the horns when they saw men run,
When they saw them looking for holes in the solid ground . . .
I guess they were tired of being ridden in
And stopped and started by pygmies for silly ends,
Of wrapping cheap cigarettes and bad chocolate bars
Collecting nickels and waving platinum hair
And letting six million people live in a town.
I guess it was that, I guess they got tired of us
And the whole smell of human hands.
But it was a shock
To climb sixteen flights of stairs to Art Zuckow’s office
(Noboby took the elevators twice)
And find him strangled to death in a nest of telephones,
The octopus-tendrils waving over his head,
And a sort of quiet humming filling the air. . . .
Do they eat? . . . There was red . . . But I did not stop to look.
I don’t know yet how I got to the roof in time
And it’s lonely, here on the roof.
For a while, I thought
That window-cleaner would make it, and keep me company.
But they got him with his own hoist at the sixteenth floor
And dragged him in, with a squeal.
You see, they coöperate. Well, we taught them that
And it’s fair enough, I suppose. You see, we built them.
We taught them to think for themselves.
It was bound to come. You can see it was bound to come.
And it won’t be so bad, in the country. I hate to think
Of the reapers, running wild in the Kansas fields,
And the transport planes like hawks on a chickenyard,
But the horses might help. We might make a deal with the horses.
At least, you’ve more chance, out there.
And they need us, too.
They’re bound to realize that when they once calm down.
They’ll need oil and spare parts and adjustments and tuning up.
Slaves? Well, in a way, you know, we were slaves before.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t.
(I wish I hadn’t looked into the beauty-parlor
And seen what was happening there.
But those are female machines and a bit high-strung.)
Oh, we’ll settle down. We’ll arrange it. We’ll compromise.
It won’t make sense to wipe out the whole human race.
Why, I bet if I went to my old Plymouth now
(Of course you’d have to do it the tactful way)
And said, ‘Look here! Who got you the swell French horn?’
He wouldn’t turn me over to those police cars;
At least I don’t think he would.
Oh, it’s going to be jake.
There won’t be so much real difference–honest, there won’t–
And I’d go down in a minute and take my chance–
I’m a good American and I always liked them–
Except for one small detail that bothers me
And that’s the food proposition. Because, you see,
The concrete-mixer may have made a mistake,
And it looks like just high spirits.
But, if it’s got so they like the flavor . . . well . . .

Stephen Vincent Benet :

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 821 Wednesday, April 23, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

I went out to Kaiser Audiology today. Two hours later I knew officially what I knew from observation anyway: my right ear hasn’t changed since the tests that sent me off to COSTCO to get their hearing aids, and my right ear hearing aid doesn’t need any adjustment. My difficulties in hearing now all come from not having two working ears.

My left ear hearing works a lot better now than it did a few weeks ago when I first noticed the Sudden Hearing Loss (official diagnosis, and yes, everyone is quite aware that it has little information value). At one time I heard nothing in the left ear. I now have about 25% comprehension in it. I don’t hear low levels of sound but at least I hear something: when this first happened the left ear was as deaf as a post. Then came the steroid treatment with the needle through the eardrum (left ear only) and things began to improve, but at first not much. Lately there has been much more improvement in the left ear.

I continue to use both hearing aids. In the left ear I don’t hear much, but I hear something, and it does help comprehension. I now hear the bell/gong sounds of the hearing aid as it tells me about failing batteries and conveys other messages. And I hear some sounds in there.

The COSTCO technician noticed a scab on my left eardrum from the insertion of the needle to convey the steroids. The physician at Kaiser today used some oils and a miniature vacuum cleaner to cleans that ear out; after he had done so, I noticed an improvement in my hearing. They should have had the audiology doctor lady do the test after the EENT surgeon saw me, but that’s not the way they scheduled it, and my next appointment is in six months. If things improve at all I will go back to COSTCO and get these things reprogrammed again. That comes with the purchase price.

I continue to recommend the COSTCO hearing aids.

Niven and I went up the hill today. A bit more than four miles round trip, and a climb of about 700 feet. My balance has become so precarious that we can’t go by the old trails we used to take. We have to stay on the fire road now. Still, it’s a good hill.

Here’s Niven at what isn’t quite the road summit – that’s another 30 yards on – but at a great view and the place where we usually turn around.

And here’s the fire road on the way down – not the way we came up. As I say it’s a great trail.

I took some pictures in 2000, with a short report on part of the trail: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosreports/walk.html And if you Google Chaos Manor trail pictures you’ll get lots of references and links and pictures assuming you have any interest in such thing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=chaos+manor+hill+trail+pictures+pournelle&tbm=isch&imgil=V1mIA0N-fQLgJM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcTZKKs1Dgk8LWCxXUE5Yc7e439Zr9T9GoYDS0w1VHX0FjykCXoB%253B1280%253B960%253BjIEcIOjIFIJt6M%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.jerrypournelle.com%25252Fpictures%25252Fwotf.html&source=iu&usg=__agE3hFMhhG8QfeaPM2AbsWn8lVU%3D&sa=X&ei=pbRYU5C-IsS3yAT0n4CgDA&ved=0CIQBEPUBMAw&biw=961&bih=459#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=V1mIA0N-fQLgJM%253A%3BjIEcIOjIFIJt6M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.jerrypournelle.com%252Fimages%252Fwotf%252Fp9250005.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.jerrypournelle.com%252Fpictures%252Fwotf.html%3B1280%3B960

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 821 Tuesday, April 22, 2014

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy.

Nancy Pelosi. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives

Referring to the Affordable Health Care Act

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

“…the only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us alone.”

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon

I have just finished a lengthy telephone conference call involving an event that several Sigma SF members including me will be attending at Hilton Island Conference Center this June 8 – 12 http://www.hh2014.org/. It’s about Large Scale Integrated Circuitry and the future, with an emphasis this year on Nanotechnology. As readers here know, I’m very interested in the effects of Moore’s Law and the inevitable advance of technology on a free society, so I think I’ll have things to say there. I also expect to learn a lot. Several other Sigma science fiction writers with technical backgrounds will be there.

Meanwhile I am discovering that there is Life After Taxes, and now that Easter is over Chaos Manor is returning to something like normal chaos as opposed to the agitated variety that has dominated most of this year.

I have a stack of topics to write about. One is some comments on the theory of Capital ; Marx had much to say about it, but his view that “Capital is barren” was clearly wrong. He couldn’t have anticipated Moore’s law, of course; yet in a sense he did in that he anticipated, after the Class Society and the State withered away, a time when productivity was so high that no one had to do much work, and

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

 

Of course the reality of the communist state was quite different, but then that state had more to do with Lenin than Marx’s dream: Trotsky warned that until the Revolution was universal, you could never build the true communist state. A communist state in a capitalist world must look to its defenses and its security, and since the Revolution is imperfect so will the society be. Various versions of Trotsky’s views permeated the American left during and following World War II, and some of that transmuted into what became known as neo-conservatism.

But technology and productivity are making it more and more possible for a larger and larger portion of society to be artists, critics, and such who do not produce consumer goods. They probably will not rear cattle, since that takes a certain amount of investment and land and transport: in Marx’s time as he looked about Thuringia, it was easy to imagine being a professor who had a small stead of cattle and perhaps poultry. That kind of farming always looks more attractive to those who haven’t had to do it. Having raised cattle and tended chickens as part of my growing up, I soon was glad enough to leave that to the field hands while I played about with the Encyclopedia Britannica. The newness of farm activities wears off fast, or did in my case.

I note in today’s Wall Street Journal that welders make $100,000 a year and more, and the Journal advocates changing our school system back to include shop classes and other useful arts, rather than being devoted to college prep. The notion that in order for anyone to amount to anything they will need college degrees is a pernicious falsehood probably spread by the colleges. I note that one drawback to the Federal government’s attempt to find new mechanism for forgiving student debt and liberate the middle class from this particular bondage is the very real fear that the colleges will simply raise their prices (and the pay of the faculty, administrators, and non-education staff) accordingly. This is worth thinking about.

Has there ever been a real debate about the necessity for a college education? Particularly the kind of college education most of our institutions of higher education provide? There are more and more stories of college graduates, deep in debt, working at coffee houses or in various other service jobs, and more and more who would have been better off going to work when they left high school: not only did they put themselves deep in debt for an education that taught them to do little that anyone would pay them to do, but they started late and now have no work experience, have developed no work habits and social skills of the work place, and face a rocky future.

Aside: when I was in aerospace at Boeing, we calculated that if one started in the production line on leaving high school, and another started college to gain an engineering degree, even in those days when the University of Washington tuition was nominal, by the time the engineer had earned as much money as the steadily employed production worker, they would be well into their thirties. This was in about 1956. I doubt it has changed much now except that the steady employment of the production worker is now far from assured, and as productivity increases, is becoming less probable.

Enough: I am still working on what happens to a Republic when half of its citizens are not needed: who cannot find employment that allows them to possess the goods of fortune in moderation. That was Aristotle’s definition of middle class and it is still correct for this kind of analysis; and rule by the middle class produces a democratic state. But when half the citizens cannot find work that justifies possession of the goods of fortune in moderation, what happens? “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.” One wonders if the US has not been conquered by those who wish the end of the old free republic. They have certainly built the right education system to accomplish that goal.

But it certainly benefits the intellectuals who dominate the university system. Act of war by whom?

I have much more to look at. Why are writers forbidden to join together as a union, (WGA the screen writers are exceptions because they work for hire and sell their product; unlike writers like me who own and market what we sell. SFWA isn’t a union and can’t act like one, which is of great benefit to the publishers. Now the self-publication revolution is changing the world of publishing like dreams, and it can only continue. As I said back in A Step Father Out, I put my work up on an information utility, you pay to read it, a royalty goes from your bank account to mine, and where’s the need for that blood sucking publisher? That world appears to be here. Alas my asteroid mining world I thought we would have by 2020 has not happened…

And Silicon Valley, which for a while broke free of the regulatory mechanisms and created the technologies that built much of this brave new world, making possible the robots and manufacturing techniques that have so greatly expanded productivity, needs to be taken to task because Apple and Google had some agreements about not poaching personnel from each other. The Lords of Silicon Valley must be punished for making this revolution and escaping the regulatory agencies. But the Iron Law of Bureaucracy moves inexorably on.

Interestingly :

Guess Who Makes More Than Bankers: Their Regulators

In 2012 at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. the average pay was $190,000. At the Federal Reserve? It won’t say.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304311204579507512375765276

It turns out that the regulators including their limousine drivers (Motor Vehicle Operators at FDIC: $82,130) make more than the average bank employee (about $50,000).

Bureaucrats do very well for themselves, as the Iron Law (https://www.google.com/#q=pournelle%27s+iron+law+of+bureaucracy ) would predict. At the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, secretaries average $79,182, Less than drivers, but still a fair amount.

In India for a very long time the main ambition was to get a government job and work for the Permit Raj. There’s still a strong impulse in that direction. Are we coming to that in the US?

But it’s late and I have to do a mail column to catch up on that. Later.

How to survive…

http://nypost.com/2014/04/19/how-to-survive-after-the-inevitable-armageddon/

"Author Lewis Dartnell, a 32-year-old British astrobiologist and polymath, isn’t writing with tongue in cheek. Though the book ["The Knowledge"] is brief and points out in a daunting introduction exactly what you’re up against — the world is so complex that no single person starting from scratch could even make a pencil, much less a motor — “The Knowledge” is an actual starter guide that proposes quick-and-dirty solutions to the most elementary issues."

One might wonder if this author consulted "Lucifer’s Hammer" as part of his research.

Charles Brunbelow

Rather more up to date than ours was. I need to write a piece on modern survival.  I met some of my old survivalists friends recently.  We’re still here.  I always said the best way to survive a nuclear war is not to have one.  But I am not sure hoe to make sure we don’t’ have a series of emp’s that shut down the grid…  Not sure Armageddon is inevitable, but sometimes thing look grim.  It is very much in our interest – and in Russia’s – that it not happen. Hedge your bets, ladies and gentlemen, hedge your bets. Someone will inherit the Earth.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.