The Material Post-Mortem
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Middle age is the point at which you realize that distance is simply a trick of forced perspective.
The Unholy Consult continues creeping forward. I wish I could say how far I’ve come, but since I don’t write in a linear fashion I really have no metric. I have fifteen chapters started, zero completed.
In the meantime, my brain has decided to plague me with a number of inconsistencies and details that I overlooked in The White-Luck Warrior. It always does this after the final proofs have been sent out. Even though I know that 99.9% of the readers won’t even notice them, they still drive me crazy – enough to resolve, like I always resolve, to never let this happen again, even though it inevitably will. I have this retirement fantasy where I have the time and inclination to rewrite the whole series a la Henry James.
For some reason I find myself cycling in and out of that if-I-had-a million-dollars mood that I’m sure all of you are familiar with. I keep thinking about Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, and how there is at least a dozen companies just as big lurking in the near future. A number of technologies are set to begin scaling up–whole new industries that will lead to new dominant players and a bunch more shake-and-bake billionaires.
It’s got me thinking about economics, and whether any model exists for the kind of transformative upheavals to come. It seems to me, that the continuous integration of transformative technologies into a given economy will actually do more to undermine equity than otherwise. If I had a million dollars, for instance, I would invest in all the viable startups in, say, the organ replacement domain, knowing full well that whatever losses I suffer on those firms the market weeds out will be more than compensated for by my stake in the inevitable winners to come. But since I don’t have a million dollars, I can only watch from the bleachers–like most everyone else.
I’m wondering, in other words, if periods of rapid and profound technological change inevitably generate ever greater economic inequities, and if so, what it means when such change becomes continuous. Since I see capital as our primary way of distributing power, and since I think humans are hardwired to generally confuse their self-interest with the will of God, I’m wondering what the future holds as venture capitalists accumulate more and more power. Has anyone developed a theory of a Venture Economy?
It seems to me that ramping up the rate of technological transformation changes a crucial variable in our understanding of the way markets function. For instance, given that humans have only so much stomach for change (tolerances that were likely fixed in the stone age), could we be entering a period where the changes wrought by innovation will outrun our individual and collective ability to readily adapt. Will the new social divisions turn more and more on our ability to adapt, to embrace the new and dispose of the old? Will our strategies for self-identification (and glorification) evolve so far as to ‘tribalize’ early and late adopters, to turn marketing consumer categories into identifications that supercede things like religion and nationality, giving rise to a new feudalism, like that in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age?
Whatever the material post-modern brings, I can guarantee you we won’t be ready for it…
Three Pound Brain 
I think they do. The biggest rewards that arise with a new company that revolutionizes and/or creates a new industry largely go to rights-holder, the company executives and founders, and the people who lent them money (and were intelligent in drawing up the contracts).
As for “continuous”, I’m not so sure. We’ve got some interesting areas to explore in the fields of materials science, biosciences, and computing (especially if the AI enthusiasts turn out to be right), but we’re already butting heads against the laws of physics in other areas, and it’s not hard to see society reaching a point where taking advantage of further technological advance would simply be too costly without the promise of great gains to make up for it (which is the reason why we don’t have extensive colonization off-world – extremely high capital costs with dismal and/or unclear economic gain).
To use a hypothetical example, let’s say that in 2170, it’s possible for humanity to create anti-matter for anti-matter rocket engines, but at the price of spending money equal to 30% of the world’s GDP for 25 years to build a bunch of gigantic particle accelerators in the inner solar system. Sure, the technological advance is there, but it’s unlikely anyone will exploit it.
Sorry, that kind of went on too long.
That’s going on the assumption that the whole edifice doesn’t just collapse. I don’t really think it will happen, but hey… oil’s a limited resource and US/Europe/Russia/China/India are consuming it at an increasing pace. One recent paper suggest that demand will outstrip supply as early as 2015.
This is fun. Will humans be selected for brains or brawn in the next 100 years? (Or maybe just resistance to the nuclear dust?)
Stay tuned!
jorge– notice how f’ed up the weather’s been this year? we may not need to worry about nuke dust… 😦
I’m kinda with Brett on this one. Cost for some of these advances is going to be so exorbitant that it will render some of them moot until the tech becomes more viable. However, the prototype-to-viability gap has been shrinking at an exponential rate for a century.
If the economy doesn’t put the brakes on the technological advancements, I honestly think we’re going to hit some sort of cultural or sociological ceiling for how fast we can keep going.
The economy needs to be flexible like water. A solid to a plasma state of evaporation, and condense back into a free flowing liquid. Under pressure, money should be come solid, and condense all vapour / liquid states. It would seem, that the freezing point of money, is now permanently liquid, and wont become solid again.
To solidify money, you have to destroy / crush its liquidity. Which is a serious problem to the steamy individuals who keep heating up the economy.
How do you mean ‘we’?
Dependence on infrastructure is the only thing that clumps masses of people into what your talking about and makes it a ‘we’. That and the notion that land can be owned and that a gang who wears blue can incarcerate you for being on land ‘owned’ by someone. That way your apparently always forced into the ‘game’ as much as you must stand on land.
But I think you might be musing more to find compelling possible scenarios and such. I totally grant what your describing is compelling – in a massive pile up car accident sort of way (but if it’s a story we can all goulishly observe without concern, of course…). Gah, I’m putting up too much disclaimer – it’s compelling! Rock on! 🙂
Now I want to read The Diamond Age…
I think that the new marketing consumer categories are going to become a new religion. Religion, I think, is about function rather than content. Ancient societies conjured religions based on the world they knew, we are doing the same right now, and the world we know is the consumer world. Religions wire our brains so we can readily accept the social world we are embedded in, that acceptance then appears as the natural order of things. We are, I think, witnessing the formation of a new religion, a religion built around the concept of free market radicalism. So, yes, inequality will likely be increased, but also justified with “the market wills it”. To complicate matters most people do not posses the intelligence to remain relevant within the emergent technologies. New technologies do not translate into employment. In the old days governments just needed to invest in manufacturing. Anybody with half a brain could work in the manufacturing floor. Not anymore. The world is becoming too complex. We may end up with very high unemployment because most of us will lack the intelligence to deal with even an average job.
[QUOTE]In the meantime, my brain has decided to plague me with a number of inconsistencies and details that I overlooked in The White-Luck Warrior. [/QUOTE]
Actually, i think you did a marvelous job on the mistakes/inconsistencies area in Earwa, especially when it’s complexity and richness comes to mind. While i believe you said you’ve had a rough sketch of the world in your head for years, there’s always so much that arises almost incidentally during writing and is in conflict with yet another obscure statement god-knows-where.
Of course, when you miss a detail here or there, you can just blame it on the character we’re experiencing it through 😉
Upholds the relativity of character opinions/perceptions and allows for an unexpected plot fork.
[QUOTE]New technologies do not translate into employment. In the old days governments just needed to invest in manufacturing. Anybody with half a brain could work in the manufacturing floor. Not anymore. The world is becoming too complex. We may end up with very high unemployment because most of us will lack the intelligence to deal with even an average job.[/QUOTE]
Something along these lines. We’re not all uncut diamonds, waiting to be polished and put to use. We have most of the world reproducing like rabbits, with negligent education and abysmal chances of ever being anything but a burden, living in their push-button modernized caves.
Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s Parecon is a system of economics that seems eminently able to handle a lot of the futures this world could throw at us…the survivable ones anyway.
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