From: streater@unixjr.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Tim Streater)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: The end of society as we know it (was Re: Currency Problems)
Date: 3 Oct 92 08:12:03 GMT
Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

In article <1992Oct1.120011.6508@bristol.ac.uk> P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee) writes:
>
>As a thought experiment, consider technology taken to its limit.
>(After all, that's where we are trying to take it.)  It's now 2050, and
>we have completely technified the country.  We can make everything we
>need (goods AND services) using technological solutions.  No workforce
>required.  But, since no-one has a job, no-one can afford to buy all
>these products.  Not a good solution, but it IS the direction which
>many of us are, if we're honest with ourselves, working towards.
>

Try a thought experiment in the opposite direction. Go back to 1850, and tell
the folks then that all the goods and services they then produced, could be
produced with (say) 5% of the workforce employed then, in 1850, to do it.
Shock horror all round! But what will the other 95% do? Answer, they will do
all manner of things *inconceivable* to the folks of 1850, but completely
familiar to you and me. I think it's pointless worrying about where technology
will be in 2050. 

>solar-generated electricity, but maybe wave-power and/or wind).

Wind and wave have done very little so far. Even in California.  I never hear
it said, for example, that for the price of seeing the hills bounding 3 major
passes into the Central Valley *littered* with thousands of windmills, we have
avoided needing to build some large number of power stations. (If other CA
residents have figures on this, I would appreciate hereing them). Where would
we build hundreds of windmills in the UK - people wouldn't stand for it. Where
is there enough consistent wind (other than Westminster)? As for wave, if I
remember, the River Severn is the only place in the UK with enough of a tidal
bore to make it viable - environmental shock-horror all round.

>
>the have-nots, we'll see a backlash that will make the Luddite movement
>look like an afternoon tea party at Buckingham Palace.  And, in my 
>
One of life's biggest challenges is to be able to accept change. If you can say
to someone, I promise you "a" job for life, as long as you accept that it won't
always be "this" job, and if you get the person's buy-in, then you have a very
powerful recipe for economic strength, which may be what underlies the Japanese
and German success. The Luddites and their modern day counterparts, the
printers and the coalminers and, less visibly but still to be included, their
managerial counterparts (choose all your own favourites, here), cannot accept
this. They want "this" job for life.

In the UK last xmas, I saw part of a programme about the privatisation of 
refuse collection in Camden. There was one dustman, he not only wanted "this"
job, he wanted "this" round! To him, having collected refuse from the same set
of houses for the last 25 years, change was anathema. We need to be able to
find ways of dealing humanely with him, while at the same time allowing some
of his colleagues, also shown on the program, the freedom to form their own
refuse company and compete in that market, to everyone's benefit.

tin.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british