[ExI] Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

[Giovanni Santostasi]

Why microtechnology should preclude the development of macrotechnology?
Maybe because macrotechnology is less marketable and it takes much more
time to develop.
What I take from the article is a the general, overall message. It may be
wrong in some of the historical details or in some technological
terminology but the overall message is something that makes you to sit and
ponder.

Corporatism is fascism incarnated as Mussolini aptly said.
It is a suffocating machine that allows control and manipulation of masses
and it can only serve small elites in the inner circle.

It has short sight, greedy goals. We don't have the future of science
fiction because I grandiose vision of life, an epic vision of life is what
is needed and corporatism cannot offer that, in fact it fears that.
This why so many people find refuge in video games (another simulation) to
find an epic dimension of life and corporatism is fine with that.

The article most powerful analysis is why corporatism is trying to resist
at any cost full automation and its final consequence that is
democratization of the means of production and rather use modern slavery to
continue to have control of production.

That is the core of the matter.

In fact, this is the fundamental question (that corporatism is trying to
avoid to answer at any cost): what will happen to our economical and social
organization when almost of the manual jobs and non creative jobs (from
factory worker, to taxi and truck driver, to cashier and even lawyers and
accountants) are done by robots?

The only solution I can imagine that doesn't require widespread riots and
social revolution is redistributing and equalizing wealth.

Giovanni









On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 18/06/2012 22:37, Giovanni Santostasi wrote:
>
>> The article is good, even if does silly mistakes in terminology.
>>
>
> I am not convinced. Look at this passage:
>
>  Why did the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was
>> expecting—the moon bases, the robot factories—fail to happen? There are two
>> possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological
>> change were unrealistic (in which case, we need to know why so many
>> intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not
>> unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so many
>> credible ideas and prospects).
>>
>
> It completely misses the possibility that past expectations about the
> *direction* of technology was wrong. The old future was all
> macrotechnology: spacecraft, fusion, flying cars and soaring buildings. But
> what we got was microtechnology: biotech, computers, Internet,
> nanotechnology. This is important and powerful stuff, yet it is dismissed
> as mere simulation.
>
> I think the article meshes nicely with Tyle Cowen's "The Great Stagnation"
> and Thiel's worries. I do think we have a problem. But I don't think the
> diagnosis is right. The reason we don't have antigravity shoes is not that
> we academics spend too much time writing grant proposals. It is because we
> have no clue how to do it. Bureaucracy and risk aversion *are* problems,
> but they are hardly due to capitalism - just check the distribution of
> uncertainty avoidance as per Hofstede in the world and crosscorrelate with
> economic freedom.
>
> I think Tyler Cowen gets closer to the point. We have picked all the
> low-hanging fruit, found ways of expanding our world that doesn't
> necessarily equate to economic growth or progress, and indeed set up
> incentive structures that do not promote radical or long-term change. But
> the later problem is in many ways local to the developed countries: there
> is a real chance that the BRICs will just ignore it (and make their own
> interesting mistakes).
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
>
>
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