Of course it should be possible both to deploy Envoy's innovative capabilities beneficially on Harbor and also to use those same capabilities to expand mankind's role in the universe. However, the Venture League's opponents believe that a serious revival of starfaring is an impossible, insane goal and they therefore resist what they see as the wasting of any resources in such activity. These opponents are well-resourced and influential, able to undercut League businesses, pressurize financiers and publish disparaging propaganda, even subsidizing Seladorian missionaries.
Is it these same opponents that block the full application of Terrestrial nanotechnology and robotics on Harbor? Such an application of technology would end poverty and transform society but would also disempower precisely those groups that currently control funds and resources and use them to divert production and distribution into directions profitable for themselves. When necessities and more than necessities have become as free as air, then no one will any longer either sell goods and services or profit by selling them. Life will be lived on an entirely different and inherently freer basis.
5 comments:
It's all a matter of whose ox gets gored.
Kaor, Paul!
Simply put, as Stirling said, it depends on whose ox gets gored! In this case, the new technology "Envoy" brought inevitably meant that the currently dominant interests on Harbor will lose big. So, naturally, they will resist.
Ad astra! Sean
Take a look at how Thomas Edison tried to block the use of alternating-current technology by all sorts of dirty tricks... including electrocuting an elephant it it, IIRC.
Note that one major reason technological progress was so slow for so long is that established interests -- not just the wealthy or aristocrats but things like artisan guilds and informal trade unions -- could and did block progress because it was disruptive and threatened their accustomed methods, profits and ways of doing things.(*)
John Kay, who invented the "flying shuttle" for handlooms in 1733 (doubling productivity with one simple low-tech device any carpenter could make once he'd seen it), was threatened and intimidated quite grossly, including via riots and loom-smashing, by the weavers of his hometown.
The same invention may well have been made in France about the same time, and -was- suppressed.
The authorities of the Ancien Regime often backed people who violently suppressed innovations, because they feared social unrest, and/or because they agreed that the inventors of labor-saving devices were selfish monsters endangering decent people's livelihoods for selfish gain.
The State in England and its dominant landed classes in the Industrial Revolution were notably more sympathetic to and protective of inventors than their equivalents anywhere else. (Except Scotland, where it was even more so after 1707 and especially after 1746.)
Not least because England was an oligarchy and its rulers just didn't give a damn about technological unemployment or economic disruption harming the lower orders, as long as it profited -them-, were confident of their ability to crush lower-class objections, and who were smart enough to realize that higher prodeuctivity generally would benefit landowners.
Which is why they were cheerfully ready at the same time to enclose commons, amalgamate farms and throw peasants off their land, and to send in the dragoons to butcher anyone who objected.
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, as Napoleon said -- or an Industrial Revolution without breaking heads and sending troublemakers in hellish convict ships to Australia.
(*) Chinese intellectuals in contact with Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century China were horrified by the explanation of labor-saving devices used in European agriculture, which they feared would cause mass unemployment.
When the British smashed the Taku Forts guarding Peking in the first of the Opium Wars, they found that the only cannons in the forts capable of being aimed with trunnions were those cast by Jesuit missionaries 200 years earlier. The Chinese metalworkers were fully capable of making guns like that; but the authorities just weren't interested.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I am not surprised! I agree the established authorities in a state will behave as did the English/Scots, using technological advances to often ruthlessly maximize their wealth; or as did the French, suppress innovations for political reasons.
As Anderson reminds us many times in his works, humans are all too capable of using technological advances ruthlessly!
And China paid the hard way for being so negligent about staying technologically up to date a least in military matters!
Ad astra! Sean
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