"'Psychotechnic government had failed to solve the problems of Earth's adjustment to living on a high technological level. Conditions worsened until all too many people were ready to try desperate measures.'" (p. 54)
These two sentences summarize what we are to understand is the central problem in this opening section of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History just as "Lodestar" summarizes the central problem in the first main section of his Technic History. But what are the problems of adjustment to high technology? Why should conditions "worsen" as technology improves? The texts mention the disorientation of the technologically unemployed. I argue that subsequent generations who are not brought up either to expect or to need to be employed by someone else will not miss such employment any more than we miss the social norms of previous historical periods. But something else is not mentioned. Vested interests accustomed to profiting from the use of low technology will oppose the introduction of high technology if that introduction removes the source of their profits. That is indeed a major problem that would have to be overcome.
22 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Again, I think you are too facilely waving away the problem seen here ("Cold Victory") and "Quixote And The Windmill," if technological advances causes mass unemployment. It remains my conviction that we would then see LONG lasting despair, ennui, frustration, etc., etc. I do not believe "subsequent generations" will be so easily "educated" as you would like them to be.
Nor am I convinced by what you said about "vested interests." It would be more rational, because of being more profitable, for people with such interests to favor switching to higher technology.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Not profitable to anyone if the high technology produces what everyone needs at minimal cost.
Subsequent generations would not need to be educated to accept a different way of life. They would grow up with it and be used to it.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I think you erred in your first comment from overlooking an important principle in economics: economies of scale. That is, a manufacturer often profits MORE, long term, by selling his products at lower, not higher prices.
You keep talking about "education," but what do you mean by that? What kind of education, and by whom? Many parents will want their children educated in ways they believe are right. And that can take many and often opposing forms: secularist/atheist, Catholic, Jewish, evangelical Protestant, Buddhist, etc. If there are many ways of getting "educated," for achieving different ends, I don't see that ending as you might like.
Moreover, I still don't believe most people in a post scarcity economy will want to spend their entire lives in idleness. I don't believe most humans will want to be artists, philosophers, aesthetes, literateurs, professional athletes, etc. Like the despairing characters in "Quixote And The Windmill," I believe most would prefer to find meaning and personal satisfaction in less high culture ways.
The Teramind in Anderson's HARVEST OF STARS books tried to beguile the peoples of Earth in being satisfied with reenacting past cultures and ways of life. For a time that worked, but only until people realized how meaningless that was, how powerless humans had become in a world where computerized A.I.s were making all the real decisions. Then we again began seeing despair, ennui, frustrated anger, etc. THAT, I believe, is what I bellieve would happen in a post scarcity economy.
I prefer the solution Anderson advocated in the HARVEST books, mankind breaking out into the galaxy and people going their own ways, with all the risks, cost, dangers that means.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Most people will not want to be artists etc but they will want to do something. Yes, they will be able to find meaning in less high culture ways. In a post-scarcity economy, people individually and collectively will make their own decisions which hopefully will include space exploration and colonization.
School education, whatever its denominational flavour, is preparation for adult social life. Pupils have been made to sit at desks following instructions from teachers because their adult jobs were going to consist of sitting at desks or work benches or standing on production lines following instructions from managers. When adult life is completely different from that, then educational preparation for it will also be completely different.
When very advanced technology produces everything that anyone needs, then there will no longer be any need for an economic class that owns the means of production and that profits by employing workers. Everyone will be an owner/shareholder, whatever we want to call it. Think outside the box. Don't project our social relationships into a completely different society. Sf is about imagining and projecting change in the future.
Paul.
Paul: again, human beings are not infinitely flexible. It's quite possible that lack of a sense of -necessary- purpose would drive them to severe dysfunction.
True leisure classes -- whether rich or poor -- have a bad, bad track record.
(I don't mean merely the rich; I mean those who are supported, one way or another, without anything demanded of them, including no expectation of public duty and no practicable means of turning their situation to purposes beyond the personal).
And bear in mind that there is no such thing as "enough". The average person in a developed or semi-developed country today is unimaginably rich by standards only a century or so old -- but are they all satisfied?
Of course not.
People's satisfaction, whether with material goods or power, is only exercised in -relative- terms. They don't measure things emotionally on an -absolute- scale, they do so -relative to other people-.
That's why "envy" is on the list of the Seven Deadly Sins -- what's more, it's the only one that doesn't even give you momentary pleasure when you indulge it.
But it's a powerful, powerful force.
Paul: no, they're made to sit at desks following instructions because thousands of years of trial and error has shown that's the only way of getting the -average- student to learn anything that isn't a) easy and b) doesn't of itself interest them.
There are people who don't need that. There just aren't, in the nature of things, all that many of them, because human beings are designed to conserve and economize on attention and effort.
Babylonian and Egyptian schools 5,000 years ago used roughly the same methods. This is not an accident.
Sean: agreed. People need a sense of serious purpose in their lives, or even play loses its savor.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: As so often Stirling's comments explained much better than I could why I have to continue to disagree with you.
Mr. Stirling: This long, tedious convalescence of mine has been giving me some idea of what that loss of savor is like. So I try to do pro-active things every day. Such as doing therapeutic exercises multiple times.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I have the advantage of making my living at what would be my hobby if I couldn't.
My idea of future education:
1st stage: helping each individual to identify their interests and abilities;
2nd: training in specific tasks, roles etc;
3rd: long sabbaticals to travel and see what everyone else is doing;
4th: retraining and change of direction available to everyone at any time.
An association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: And I'm very glad you are able to make a living with your "hobby." I look forward to reading your corrected/revised version of TO TURN THE TIDE when it's pub. later this year.
Paul: Regretfully, I think your educational plan is not realistic. I don't think it could work for much more than, say, the ten percent of the human race who are not AVERAGE, at best, in intelligence and abilities.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: note that without intensive drilling, people will not have the basic skills which enable them to learn anything else.
And they will not joyfully engage in those drills as children. They won't do it at all unless forced to do so.
Also, add in that most people are, to be blunt, rather stupid -- and this is inherent, since intelligence is largely a product of your genetics (absent severe environmental insults like acute malnutrition, etc.).
People differ in their mental -potentials-, just as they differ in things like height, keenness of eyesight, athletic ability, etc.
Mr Stirling,
Agreed differences in physical and intellectual abilities. The equalities that matter are:
equality before the law;
equality of opportunity;
equality of voting rights.
Maybe some more but I think those three cover most of it.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I agree.
Paul: But even the most "advanced" democracies don't have equality of voting rights. In the US minors below age 18 and convicted criminals can't vote. And I believe those restrictions are right.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But that is still equality. The laws that, if ur below a minimum age or have been convicted, then you can't vote apply equally to everyone.
BTW, do you mean that criminals while in prison can't vote or that anyone, once convicted of a criminal offence, can never vote again?
Prisoners, while imprisoned, are deprived of their freedom which includes the right to vote.
Paul.
I do have a reservation about 'criminals' not being allowed to vote.
If I doubt that some action should be illegal, I would not favor depriving people who do that action, from voting & so helping to repeal the law forbidding it.
To take an extreme case, depriving someone who has helped as escaped slave to get away, from voting.
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: First paragraph. True, I agree with your reasoning.
Second paragraph, I don't know. I never thought before of looking up the details of the voting rights or not of criminals. I speculate a person convicted of a crime could not vote for the duration of his sentence. Or, if paroled, for the duration of the length of time set for his parole.
Your last sentence: I agree.
Jim: But the crimes in US law which deprives convicts of the right to vote are for offenses like murder, manslaughter, rape, theft, etc. I don't think you object to penalizing offenses like these.
And your analogy has not been relevant in the US since 1865. Or, for before the Civil War, I would need to see what penalties were imposed by the Fugitive Slave Act.
Ad astra! Sean
I used the Fugitive Slave issue as something that would no longer have anyone arguing that it should be considered a crime.
To take an issue which is still live. Some people would classify abortion as murder. If they manage to get that into law, should someone who helps a woman get an abortion be both put in jail & prevented from voting to change that law?
Kaor, Jim!
To be clear, a direct, deliberate, and intentional abortion is the crime of murder because it directly attacks and kills the unborn child. The perpetrator of the abortion should be imprisoned, and as a convicted felon should not vote for whatever length of time set by the State he lived in.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
In English law, murder is "...the unlawful killing of a reasonable creature in being and under the King's peace with malice aforethought expressed or implied, death following within a year and a day."
"...in being..." means having been born, having become independent of the mother. Abortion, when illegal, was always a different offence.
Paul.
Here is an essay on the morality of abortion.
The author argues that even if one grants the premise that the fetus is a person, abortion isn't clearly wrong in most cases.
https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
Kaor, Jim!
I absolutely disagree with this writer. All lives created by the union of sperm from a male and an egg from the woman are human lives. And since the unborn child is human, then he cannot be justly killed because a fetus is totally unable to do any harm either knowingly or maliciously.
Ad astra! Sean
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