The Fragments I Have Shored

"LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats        5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….        10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."
--The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot

In an age of eternal turmoil, what can possibly remain important?  If every moment of every day is a new superlative, the world becomes devoid of comparatives.

I remember when the Guiness Book of World Records was a big deal.  Us boys bought the new edition every year and would faithfully memorize the most amazing facts we could find to regale our friends with factoids.  It was also fun to see which records had not fallen since the previous year.

Kids today don't seem to care.  Just waking up sets new records, or so it seems.  The world is in a constant state of flux, where extraordinary events are commonplace, and the commonplace is the most vile form of mundane and banal.


I briefly reminisced on Skype early this morning with a friend back in Texas.  We marveled for a moment at our ability to conduct business and have conversations in real time half a world apart.  In fact, those abilities were free, outside of the minimal monthly charge for internet access.  The stuff of wildly absurd science-fiction movies and books just 40 years ago are now expected, and even necessary to daily life.

What is even more amazing is the cavalier manner in which most of us accept the extraordinary as something expected and required.  No different, really, than the way my generation treated cars, which were to my parents and grandparents extraordinary new devices.

Eventually, the world gets away from us.  We reach an age in which the marvels are far too frequent and amazing to bother paying attention.  We relegate the responsibility to our kids and grandkids to keep up with it all, as we opt to stroll down familiar lanes and greet old experiences.

If you are under 40 and reading this, then the same thing will happen to you, far sooner than you would imagine possible, especially now as the marvels come faster and faster.  Eventually, you will cease to be amazed, even excited.  Eventually, you will throw up your hands and quit worrying about all of it and just be happy to sit and watch the clouds.

Just as the blacksmith gave way to the mechanic, and the mechanic will give way to self-repairing robots, we all become obsolete.  We all outlive our usefulness and even our desire to remain relevant to the extant culture.  After a while, it's enough to pluck a fresh tomato and bell pepper from the garden, make some homemade vinaigrette and enjoy a fresh salad for lunch with the taste of sunshine still in it.

It's not that the creative spark is spent, it's just that we cover it with dirt in the hopes of reviving the fire later in the day with some new catch to roast.

It's not that we no longer enjoy the race, it's just that we finally realize there is no winner - each wave is ultimately overtaken by the next.

The best part is reaching that point where we no longer give a high hoot what anyone else thinks, and just worry about what makes us happy.  You can set all the records you want, but at some point someone else will come along and erase all your efforts.

It's not a bad thing, really, to realize it's fairly pointless.  The memories make a fond companion, if we bothered in our youth to make them.  That, I suppose is the real crime of hte extant culture.  All memories come through a box now.  There is no adventure, no pitting one's self against the elements and being self-satisfied that we survived whatever the world could throw at us.

It is not the same to launch an app.  There is no sense of victory at overcoming time and space.  There is no Grand Battle to fight when we can simply send a robot to do a Man's work.  The only frontier left is the one inside, and precious few dare go there now.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

"Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach? 
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. 
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."

The World Late And Soon

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 
The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

When William Wordsworth penned this lament of the Industrial Revolution in 1807, he could not imagine just how materialistic and divorced from Nature we humans have become.  It never ceases to amaze me how little we modern humans know of the Natural cycles and processes that feed, cloth and sustain us.

I recall an incident in 1996, when Comet Hyakutake rolled through the Solar System putting on a rather amazing display during closest approach to Earth.  One evening, I was laying out on the lawn with my binoculars and camera capturing images and observing the comet.  It was early evening and a group of neighborhood kids had gathered around trying to figure out what I was doing.

"What are you looking at," one asked.  As I glanced around at them, I was truck that not one was looking up to see what was clearly hanging over their heads.

"Comet Hyakutake," I replied, pointing up at the glowing object stretching nearly 1 degree across the sky.

"What a comet?" one asked.  Only two or three of the dozen or so kids actually followed my pointing finger upwards.  I was floored, or at least grassed.

These were all school-age kids who apparently had not heard anything in school about one of the most dazzling cometary displays that I could remember, much less they.  When I was in school, at least the science teacher would have made a whole series of lectures on the subject and assigned us to go out and observe the phenomenon and make a report.

These kids had no idea the comet was putting on such a display, nor even what a comet was.  And so was born Uncle B's impromptu astronomy class.

For a week, we met on the lawn at sundown to note how the comet had changed, moved and behaved.  We looked through the large field binoculars I owned and kept an observation log with drawings and notes about our observations.

They were awed, as was I.  Me, not so much by the comet, which was truly awesome, but by the ignorance of these children who ranged from kindergarten to fifth or sixth grade.

Perhaps, I reasoned, growing up on a farm with infinite dark skies, no TeeVee or games or devices and a rather nice telescope I had gotten on Christmas,  Maybe I was an aberration, an exception.  But my peers were equally informed, even if they didn't have an interest to sit out on cold winter nights and stare at the Universe.

Many of the children seemed completely unaware that there was a sky, much less that it was full of things to look at and that moved around on schedules that were years, decades or even centuries long.  Not only did many of them not follow my pointing finger, I had to prompt them to look up.  The comet was quite obvious, even in overlit city skies at sunset.  It was one of the most arresting sights in the night sky I have ever seen, not to mention in that March of 1996.

Later that year, I noticed two families on the street had shiny new telescopes and could occasionally be seen out in the yard watching the Moon or planets.  I felt gratified that I had opened some horizons for at least a few people, and several of the kids would occasionally wander by to ask if anything fun was going on "up there".  Since they asked, I assumed they weren't doing any independent research, but at least they were now aware of something called "the sky".

I could go on with dozens of similar examples: how I taught my wife gardening and to plant seeds during the New Moon and harvest during the Full Moon.  She's become an obsessed fanatic about gardening now, loving the daily changes in plants and the satisfaction of eating things she nurtured from seed.

Of my own children, one is an animal lover and operates a pet grooming and training service.  He got that from the dozens of exotic pets we kept when he was growing up, such as snakes, gerbils, rats (snake food), turtles, a Great Dane and a Basset Hound, and others I've since forgotten without looking through the photo album.

The other loves mountain, jungle and ocean environments.  She leans more to the artist side, like Dad, but has gone on dives, jungle excursions and mountain hikes, and prefers the more natural settings of Austin or Denver, to the industrial life of Houston.  Perhaps she was influenced by our annual treks to New Mexico to explore canyons, mountains and rivers.

They both know about the mass extinction known in geology as the K-T Boundary.  We would stop along the highway road cuts in West Texas to notice that in one layer, there were millions of sea shell, plant and fish fossils, then a thin white line, then above it...nothing.

The point of all this is that anymore the schools are worthless and the gee-gaw tech distractions are multiplying like rabbits, but with very little effort and a lot of fun, the Universe will teach anyone willing to listen.  We stumble over it, walk past it and live under it every moment of every day if we stop just for a second to notice.

The world is too much with us, late and soon!  Why not set aside some time in Life to unplug, sit back and just observe the glorious pageant going on all around us for free!  We bought our ticket at birth and it's good for a lifetime.  There is nothing a movie or gaming studio can produce that is even a fraction as amazing and entrancing as a simple bug crawling across the floor, like that cockroach in the corner I need to go stomp on.

For Auld Lang Syne

So there I was this morning, talking with a very old friend - dare I say brother of a different mother.

It had been ages since we spoke face-to-face, or should I say Skype-to-Skype.  Years of email and the occasional phone call.

We go back to age 7.  We were altar boys together.  His mother was active in my father's campaigns.  We went to school together through high school.  We spent our weekends together.  He was always cutting edge with the latest music and got me into Alice Cooper and Elton John.  We have always been brutally honest with each other, in a kind way.

He went on to an illustrious career in law, and I went on to a nefarious career in entertainment.  We never lost contact, though we have gone through long dry spells, but friendship has a way of overcoming that.

The conversation ranged over a hundred topics spanning more than an hour.  He mentioned how several folks of his acquaintance were thinking of going the ex-pat route.  Things were out of control in the home country.  We talked art and law and business.  We introduced our wives to each other.  I mentioned how much he looked like his father, who I admired greatly.

Through it all, I thought about the "old days," when we were idealistic and full of passion for the future, back when we weren't so jaded and cynical.

Then I thought about how we were talking.  We were literally on opposite sides of the world speaking in real time with full motion video.  I lost my train of thought for a moment as I pondered this modern miracle.

When he and I were kids, this kind of technology was science fiction.  We marveled at Dr. Floyd calling his daughter from orbit on her birthday, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Even before that was the comic strip Dick Tracey, with his 2-way wrist radio.  Wow, wouldn't that be cool!  And Star Trek, with their automatic doors and Bluetooth earpieces and electronic tablets that you could write on with a stylus.

My buddy and I grew in simple(r) times.  Phones were big clunky things with rotary dials.  TV was just going color and the NBC peacock was an exciting thing.  Radio dramas were just dying out.  The space age was just being born.  Telecommunications satellites were a new thing and trans-Atlantic calls were wildly expensive.

When I went on my global walk-about at 18, I sent postcards (when I could afford it), and a trans-Atlantic call meant a day at the telegraph office, making an appointment, sitting in a booth with a meter, and waiting 3-5 seconds for replies from the other end.  And that was Europe - North Africa and the Middle East were out of the question, and Asia was a technological wasteland.

In a single lifetime, speaking of my great aunt Tish, folks went from covered wagons (when her family moved to Texas in 1898, to being afraid of comets (Halley in 1910), to super highways and global telephony.

Yes, here I was, talking to my buddy on the East Coast while sitting at the breakfast table in Jakarta, having a real-time vidchat in living color.  And since I was using my tablet (with stylus), I could go out on the patio to smoke and show him some of the fun stuff in Indonesian neighborhoods.  I was daybreak here and just after dinner there.  Dr. Floyd was only 200 miles up in orbit, we were 10,000 miles apart, as the crow flies.

I thought about he and I riding our bicycles on Saturday afternoons down at Buffalo Bayou.  Chevrolet Bellaires were still new cars.  A gallon of gas (not that we needed it) was 27 cents.  The Gemini space program was still amazing stuff.  And there were no home computers or video games or cell phones.  We had to make our own fun.

"What happened to us?" my buddy asked, only partly joking about the sagging jowls and fading eye-sight.  "Gravity," I said.  We traded health-related crises and our various "procedures," a la Billy Crystal's brilliant speech in City Slickers.

We parted with vague threats to "do this more often."

"More often," I thought, "It's a miracle we can do it at all."

Dawn Of Personhood,Part 1

We had several major geo-political tremors this week.  As I write this (Friday), it looks like Brexit is in the lead by less than a million votes.  Can't cut it much finer than that, and I still don't believe it will happen, regardless of the vote.  Too much riding on it.

There's the story about Obama getting his Executive Orders handed back to him, as well.  Nothing could make me happier.  The president of the US has gotten too sloppy and lazy with these EOs.  The country doesn't have a king or a dictator (yet), or so it seems after the Supreme Court ruling.  It also shuts down the wholesale importation of immigrants and all the amnesty rubbish.  Still, a lot remains to be determined when it comes to presidential powers and Obama's determination to destroy American culture.  Honestly, if the country wants to give itself away, why not hand it back to the folks who were the original inhabitants?  But then, those cultures have long been destroyed, as well.

Out of all the big stories, though, the biggest comes from the EU parliament, and it has nothing to do with Brexit.  It has everything to do with robots and may go a long way to kick-starting a conversation that should have started a long time ago.

Topic: What do we do when machines take all the jobs?

In short, the EU has decided to give "electronic personhood" to robots, to include certain rights and obligations, such as copyright on intellectual property, the use of money in exchange and the need to pay taxes.  In effect, the EU has extended the rights of corporations to individual machines, known commonly as robots.

In case you haven't kept up your law degree for some time, the legal term "person" is a non-corporeal being created by the State, which has rights and obligations similar to corporeal citizens.  Keep in mind, too, that a citizen is a living being, though not necessarily a human.  In maritime law, a corporeal being is generally referred to as a "soul," which distinguishes it from cargo and other valuables.

The legal terminology is very convoluted, but suffice it to say that the EU has effectively imbued robots with individual identity and freedom.

Of the major news stories this week, I think this will have effects long after everyone has forgotten Obama or Brexit.  We are talking decades if not centuries will be affected by this decision.  It's that important.

As I've discussed here many times, corporate entities are a very old concept in Western law.  Unlike Asia, where officers and employees are individually liable for the actions of the whole, the Western concept separates the corporation from the individuals who make it up.  The concept is rooted in the theology surrounding Matthew 18:20, "For where two or more are gathered in my name, there too am I," or variations to that effect.  Thus, the Roman Church became an entity unto itself, wholly separate from the individuals who make it up, and as Western law evolved, corporations became the secular version of the Church.

To distinguish what are known as "legal fictions," such as corporations, they were termed "persons" under the law, as opposed to "human beings."  A "person" could have self-determination and own property, but it didn't have a "soul" or a "conscience."  Thus, the person had to be completely controlled and regulated by the State, since its actions may constitute a hazard that a human being might avoid by virtue of a conscience.

In modern Western societies, even human beings have been turned into persons, often referred to as "straw men" by so-called conspiracy theorists, so that the State could have the "right" to regulate and control every aspect of our lives - a concept deeply foreign to older ways of thinking, but which took hold in US law in the first half of the 20th century.

By granting robots "electronic personhood," the EU has created a new class of "person" that will at least have many of the legal characteristics of a corporation.  It would have the right to autonomy within the limits of the law.  It would be able to create and own property.  It would be empowered to operate in the economy as an individual, and it would have to pay taxes.

Where things get a bit murky is how those taxes would be allocated.  Some would pay into what amounts to an insurance pool to cover damages and liabilities incurred by robot persons.  It would also feed the State with its labor, much as humans do now.  It would, though still controversial, also pay into a fund to guarantee a minimal income to humans displaced by robots in the workforce.

Humans displaced by technology is nothing new.  The invention and widespread use of cars led to the near extinction of blacksmiths and livery stables.  Jethro Tull's harvester put thousands of farmers out of business and led to the rise of agribusiness.  Autolooms and sewing machines put thousands of seamstresses and weavers out of work.  Even the electric light bulb led to the demise of the lamp-lighter.

However, in most cases one innovation killed one class of jobs, but led to new ones.  Printers became pressmen.  Blacksmiths became mechanics.  Cobblers became shoe-repairmen, and so on.

What do you do when a machine is capable of replacing an entire human being?

An interesting and impending philosophical question.

How do you compete with a "person" that never needs a smoke break or a meal, never gets sick or pregnant, works 24/7 without a vacation or even sleep time, can be amortized as a capital investment, and can be taught a new task in seconds - even able to analyze and improve it functions as it goes?

We are staring down the barrel of the end of all jobs everywhere for all time.  On the one hand, that could mean that humans will finally be free to pursue self-improvement and self-actualization.  More than likely, though, given humanity's track record, it will lead to the vast majority of humans descending into abject poverty, death and misery.

Basically, it creates two entirely separate cultures.  Since humans would never allow themselves to obsolete that way, they will reject everything automated and create a new economy  This would obviously create an elite class that would no longer depend on the rest of us, and who would likely pursue a different course.

So, how would this play out?

That is a very interesting question, and now that I've set up the scenario, you'll have to wait for Part 2 to play the "What If" game.  We are likely seeing all the pieces in motion right now.  The question becomes, when will the hammer drop?

PART 2

Cutting Diamonds With Stone Axes

Note: today's column produced using Ubuntu's new version 16.04. Click to download your free install file.

Back in the Stone Age, I worked at one of the largest cancer centers in the world as a video producer.  My job was to record surgeries and create training videos to pass on techniques to other surgeons.  Kind of a scary thought.  I do have certification as a Biomedical Photographer, though, which required me to receive the same anatomical training as a doctor, which I got at Baylor Collage of Medicine.  I've actually had my hands inside a human body.  Thankfully, they were already deceased.

That's beside the point.  The point here is that the job gave me access to something that would eventually become the internet.  It was a far different beast in those days, though.  There were no site names.  Access to databases required knowing the IP address of the server you were looking for.

It was quite limited.  There were no graphic browsers then, so I had to use things like Archie, Gopher, Veronica, and Jughead apps to search the network using keywords, addresses (if I knew them), server names, or file types.  A search didn't return a nicely laid-out set of links and descriptions.  Instead, I got a list of folders and files to choose from.  If I found a file I wanted, I had to download it to my Mac Quadra 950 with 7 gig of storage (massive at the time) and open it with the appropriate software.

If the file wasn't what I was looking for, I had to repeat the process until I found it.  Given the speed (or lack thereof) of the net and the time to search and download files, looking for one item could take all day if I didn't have the exact address of the file.

One day, one of my colleagues sent me an address to download a new application to try.  It was located at University of Illinois (back then, universities and government were about the only entities on the net), meaning it took forever to get it onto my machine.  It was called Mosaic Beta, and was the first freely available graphical browser ever.  Instead of a list of folders and files, it could display the actual contents of many file types, meaning I didn't have to download anything until I found exactly what I wanted.

It didn't take long before students at various universities started using something hypertext to build customized pages that displayed information in a pleasing and even artistic way.  This was a major breakthrough!  Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was building custom pages for their projects, or schools/departments/clubs, or their curricula vitae, or just for fun.  One early site got me started in home brewing by visually detailing the steps to making home brew.

More and more updates for Mosaic came along and soon it transformed into Netscape, the first commercial browser on the market.  Combined with the ability to mask IP addresses with natural language names and sorting them by .com, .net, .org, or .edu, the internet exploded.

Having tinkered with hypertext, I was soon getting quite a bit of work building websites (as they became know) for many of the oil & gas companies in Houston.  I used BBEdit, which was one of the first WYSIWYG hypertext editors available.  I still had to hard-code a lot of things, but it greatly simplified the mind-numbing lines of code and troubleshooting.

Believe it or not, websites were a hard sell back then.  Companies didn't understand the web or what it could offer them.  A lot of folks were quickly buying up domain names, like IBM and CocaCola, and then selling them to the corporations at outrageous fees.  Didn't take long for that to become illegal, and now most of the big names (and dozens of iterations) are safely locked up.  It was heady times then.

Those of us who were early adopters and saw the vast potential of the web made a lot of money early on.  Soon, though, the technology became plug-n-play and a lot easier to use, and the marketplace got really crowded really quick.

I then went back to non-linear video/film editing, which was got me into the web in the first place.  At the time, Avid, D-Vision and EMC2 were the top platforms, and I was one of the first in my region to use the technology for direct mastering.  Most folks used it to generate "edit decision lists" or EDLs, and then take the file and the original tapes to an online house to conform and master.  I also used a Video Toaster, which was one of the first all-in-one editing and animation suites.  It was another massive pile of equipment that is completely replaced with Adobe Premier and a good video card and set of cans.

Those online houses have all but vanished now.  What used to be over a million dollars worth of high-end switchers, time-base correctors, video tape recorders (reel to reel then), monitors, scopes, and an army of technicians is now at my fingertips as I write this and cost me about $1,000.  Sitting in a comfy swivel chair in a dimly lit, well chilled room with free-flow beer and wine while an online editor conformed your EDL is now sitting in my dimly lit home office by myself with free-flow beer and wine while I squint at the screen and try to read all those tiny characters on the screen.

As for the web, the webmaster has all but vanished, replaced by a IT department that farms out the construction of websites based on the specifications of a committee.  It is then loaded on the company server and maintained by the in-house techs, who spit out various usage reports every Friday, while backing up the private network data to a safe server in India.

It's really amazing how far the technology has evolved.  As a kid trailing along with my dad on interview shows, I watched the teevee cameras go from massive black-and-white tube-type boat anchors, to hand-held HD (and now 5K) devices.  Tape has vanished and become chips.  Punch cards evolved into massive disks, which evolved into floppies, which evolved into chips.  I can do more now with three laptops, four monitors, two printers, and a handful of palm devices linked to my home network, than I could with rooms full of noisy equipment with dedicated A/C circuits that only the largest corporations could afford to own just 20 years ago.

The only thing I find retro at this point is the movement toward dozens of specialized apps instead of a one-does-all package.  I suppose it's better in some ways.  I don't have to have stuff I don't use taking up memory.  On the other hand, I spend a hell of a lot of time launching and closing things.  It's almost like having Archie, Veronica, Gopher, and Jughead again.

The one downside to all this is that a person's skill sets can quickly become obsolete if they don't spend a lot of time reading the trades and learning new packages.  It's hard to say which will survive (I loved Betamax) and which will thrive (I hated Adobe Premier).  You can be in the middle of learning the latest fad package when the Next Big Thing comes along and wipes out hundreds of hours trying to master the last Big Thing.  Remember CDs and DVDs?

In some ways, all this is good.  It has democratized communications, along with distribution hubs like YouTube.  But damn it if it doesn't play hell with folks trying to keep up their skills in the job market.  Anymore, employers figure you're washed up by 40, since you can't possibly be as up-to-date as the pimple faced Bangladeshi sitting in your old office.

I feel sorry for folks who think education stops when they get their degree.  I have always stayed on the cutting edge by reading constantly and tinkering with new tech as it comes along.

It's not just a hobby, it's survival.

In The Blink Of An Eye

I want to look at something that has been on my mind for some time.  It's a thought experiment regarding global energy and replacement technology.  The premise is that a new and amazing technology has come along that generates huge amounts of electricity without pollution and with small amounts of cheap, readily available raw materials.

For the purposes of this exercise, we'll assume that Dr. Rossi's E-CAT device is real and viable and commercially available.  We'll also use publicly available data showing that ExxonMobil has a total of 75,300 employees, and extrapolate on that.  We'll also use ExxonMobil's 2014 annual revenues of US$32.5 billion, as a data point.

According to the Wiki-bible, the world consumed 13,371 mega-tonnes of oil-equivalent in 2012, or 5.6 x 10e20 joules from all sources.  Total energy expense for 2011, was US$6 trillion, or roughly 10% of the gross global output that year (likely more each year since).

With these numbers, we see that ExxonMobil's 2014 annual revenues are but 0.54% of annual expenditures.  Using that as a guide, then ExxonMobil's 75,300 employees could be seen as roughly 1% of the global energy labor force.  This would mean that there are about 70 million people worldwide employed in the energy industry, which feels about right, since that is approximately 1% of the world's population estimate.  Taking a WAG (wild-ass guess), let's say the global average annual income of all those folks is US$10,000.  That's an annual total of about US$700 billion in wages.  A sizable chunk of change, if you ask me, especially when you grab 30% for taxes.

Now, along comes Alternative Fuel X (AFX).  It can produce 1Mw of electricity per year for a cost of US$10,000, with little or no maintenance, in a space about the size of a 40-foot container.  Using a conservative estimate for Western countries, 1Mw can supply about 750 houses.  So, AFX can supply electricity to 750 houses for about US$14/year, plus the cost of transmission lines from the generator.

Houston, Texas, to pick a random example, has roughly 718,000 houses.  That means we need 1,000 of our AFX generators to supply every family in the city.  Since the AFX can be installed just about anywhere, we don't need high-tension power lines, sub-stations, or any of that really expensive and high-maintenance equipment to deliver power.  Just 750 high-capacity lines running from the AFX to each of its houses from the parking lot at the local strip center where the box is installed.  Total cost: US$1 million plus cable to install, and about US$500/year to maintain.

Each house now has ample power that is clean, quiet, virtually uninterrupted, and can be maintained by one or two guys in the neighborhood working an hour each week.  Total cost to each house is probably around US$20/year, plus tax.  At that rate, the generator is paid for in one year (no bond issues or other financing needed) and the cost of maintenance is included.

This is a whole lot of data to crunch in your head, and we haven't even gotten into all the ancillary issues, such as power plant workers, linemen, truck and tool manufacturers, even secretaries, real estate, and the thousands of other variables involved in running the computer you are using right now.

Can you imagine what a shock something like the AFX would have on the global economy?  We've only considered home electricity, since AFX wouldn't replace internal combustion engines - at least not right away.  Even if AFX replaced just 10% of global power consumption in the first five years or so, the ripple effect would be enormous.

The price of oil would become almost meaningless to most folks.  Entire job classifications would vanish.  Alternatives such as solar and wind would become useless.  A number of very large global corporations would see their revenues slashed.  Huge government bureaucracies would become even more pointless than they already are.  Municipal bond markets, tax revenues, environmental conservation groups and their bureaucracies...all suddenly unnecessary.

Furthermore, using more or less the same reasoning process, add the economic disruption that will be caused by robots, 3-D printing, add high-temperature super-conductors.  All of these technologies, including AFX are real and are coming to market very fast.

An AFX device in every parking lot, and a robot and 3-D printer in every home would replace just about every service and blue-collar job you can imagine.  It wouldn't take long before there are 3 billion unemployed and angry people in the world, no matter how cheap and wonderful the technology sounds.

Given all this, and the many other technologies that are coming or haven't been invented yet, and we are looking at a mass economic displacement that will be studied for thousands of years if humanity survives it.

And you wonder why the elites of the world are so desperate to preserve the status quo right now?

Designed Obsolecense

I used to think I hated Mondays.  Then I came to realize that I pretty much hate any day during which I have to work.  It's not that I don't like work.  Lord knows I make enough of it for myself.  But I hate having artificial schedules and deadlines forced on me.

I once thought it would be cool to have a Star Trek world where you just walk up to the wall and speak and out pops food, beverage and clothing to order.  But then I realized that all the characters on the show had to give up significant amounts of their lives to 'serve the good of all Mankind' to get all the freebies.  Even in the 24th century, there ain't no free lunch.

It seems, though, as if we are coming to a major nexus in history.  As our technology evolves, we have less and less actual work to do.  Eventually, 3-D printing will replace most manufacturing and transportation of goods.  3-D print files will (and already are) become a form of currency.  Most people won't have to travel more than a few blocks from their houses to work or get the things they need.

With one tiny little problem.

Sure things like 3-D printing will free up a lot of time and effort and literally destroy millions of jobs worldwide.  But worse, there will ultimately form a tiny minority of people producing the food and raw materials for the rest of our lifestyles of vast leisure.

What happens when the vast majority of us become designers and traders of ideas, and only a small number are doing all the work of mining, refining and growing all our necessities?  Not only will those people demand far more attention, but they will literally hold the world hostage.  As a consequence, the leisure classes will be required to 'hold a gun to the heads' of the underclasses, or face the utter collapse of society.  In other words, slavery.

This seems to be an intractable conundrum.  The global economy is on an inexorable march towards everyone thinking and no one working.  Even on Star Trek, the replicators have to be fed raw materials to produce all the products on demand.  The crew of the Enterprise blithely fly around talking about how humanity has reached a point where everyone is an intellectual, yet every other episode involves some mining planet or food planet in trouble.  Obviously, not everyone gets to be an intellectual.  Yet the issue of who actually does all the work is never really addressed unless one of the labor planets has a problem.

We all talk about great new inventions and labor-saving devices, but there is very little discussion about what will happen when there are 4 billion people without jobs.  How will they make money?  Who will supply all the raw materials to support this enormous class of non-productive humans?  Will we each own a labor machine and make money based on its output while we sit around pursuing our intellectual advancement?  And what about all the people now who use all their free time watching TeeVee and playing games?  Will we have created a labor-free world so that we can turn our brains to jelly, since it seems most people don't want to read or pursue intellectual hobbies?

Obviously, all this talk of utopian lifestyles imply either a vast reduction in population, or a small minority who actually get to live that life while the rest of us toil in the salt mines to support their utopia.  From the looks of things, we are already at the latter stage.

I, for one, can't see how we achieve our technological dreams without some radical changes in how we do things.  Sure, it's great to talk about living Olympian lifestyles, but what happens to the part of humanity that still has to do the labor?

It's easy to say that we will ultimately produce machines to do all the work so everyone can enjoy the leisure life, but even having all those wonderful machines means that someone has to make them.  Unless they are self-designing and replicating, which has all sorts of unsavory implications itself.  Frankly, I just can't see how we achieve the liberal wet dream society without somewhere along the line having an underclass to serve the needs of the ubermenchen.  At that point, we arrive at Huxley's Brave New World of selective breeding and designer worker bees.

There are already a great number of folks without jobs and they are living in poverty, not wandering around the garden reading Emily Dickinson and discussing the symbology of T.S. Eliot.  The idea of zipping around in star ships while listening to opera and quoting Shakespeare seems a long way off, even though all these folks have the time to do it.

Though the headlines crow about each new breakthrough in technology, we need to keep in mind - and earnestly discuss - what we are going to do with the people already out of work, much less those who will be displaced by the new technology.

As the pace of innovation increases, there is less and less time to process the displaced workers and guide them into new careers.  We are obviously not at the point where one can live a life of intellectual pursuits without the need for income of some kind, and that means work, which is increasingly hard to find.

So, while the Enterprise is zipping around the galaxy with a host of neo-Platonists onboard, the rest of us are stuck with the drudge work to maintain their lofty lifestyles.  How long do you think that will last?  It won't be long before those of us doing the dirty work will start to resent the privileged few who live off our sweat.

There's some serious contemplation to do in our afternoon walks through the cloister pondering the Universe's Great Mysteries.