March 15, 2007
Past futures
I'm on spring break at the moment, and am enjoying the time to relax, reflect, and indulge in a few guilty pleasures for which I normally haven't time. One of these is golden age and early sci-fi. I just finished reading A Torrent of Faces (1967) by James Blish and Norman L. Knight, and am currently reading "The Machine Stops" (1909) by E. M. Forster. Though it doesn't exactly fall into the same genre or time period, I also read In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, which has elements of a theme present in the other two works and common to early sci-fi.
That theme is simply that as civilization advances, it has less and less use for the vast majority of the population that makes up the civilization in question.
This is, I think, something which is becoming increasingly true, and poses increasingly great problems as a result. As more and more fields of labor are occupied entirely by or greatly facilitated by machines or simply rendered unnecessary, the number of jobs goes down, and the requirements for those jobs that remain goes up. In both stories, this has advanced to the point where the tiniest fraction of the human population is actually employable, with the rest (orders of magnitude more than are alive today) living on the dole. The few employed people would all be considered genius-level today, but there really doesn't exist any meaningful work for anyone else to do. Having a job of any kind becomes the single greatest prestige marker one can have.
In A Torrent of Faces and "The Machine Stops", this isn't a huge problem because technology has advanced to the point that there is basically enough stuff to go around. Though in the former there is pretty strict rationing, everyone gets enough to eat and all medical needs etc. are met out of the abundance of society. Furthermore, the few people who do have jobs recognize that they are basically serving the masses, and the masses are entirely content to respect and obey their leaders.
Our culture, I believe, is beginning to exhibit some of the same problems, but without any of the same benefits. The gap between the rich and poor is increasing, but this isn't because of some oppressive or unjust "system". It's because there are fewer and fewer jobs in fields between the elites and manual labor, and we need a lot less manual labor than we ever have before. But unlike the societies described in the stories, we don't exist in a climate of abundance where everyone can have basically all of their needs met. Combine that with the fact that an increasing percentage of the population really isn't capable of anything more than manual labor and throw in an infectious egalitarian class-warfare mindset that refuses to acknowledge any system of mutual obligation between rich and poor, and you've got a pretty nasty situation coming on.
There seems to be a rising bar for what it takes to get on the economic bus. It used to be that if you wanted to be comfortably middle-class, you didn't even really need to go to college. A decade or two ago that became required. Now even that's no guarantee, and it becomes necessary to go to one of the best schools, and even masters degrees are starting to depreciate. Fortunately for me, my line of work doesn't seem to be exhibiting any decline in demand, but even in the legal field the base requirements for getting on the fast-track are going up.
I don't really think there's any attractive solution for this. We really don't need much labor anymore, and there isn't any way of paying people for things we don't need. We will also never reach a state of true abundance, because that's not how things go. No amount of technology will ever be able to eliminate scarcity.
Still, it's interesting to me that even almost a hundred years ago, this state of affairs was predicted by various parties. Perhaps things aren't so different. Maybe this is the constant state of affairs, with things always on the verge of flying into pieces but never quite doing it. Then again, maybe we're overdue for another October 1929.
There is certainly a "creative destruction" element to the market, but I'm not so sure that it is a bad thing. When people lose their jobs to machines, they become free to move into better jobs that were only made possible because of technological advances.
For example, telephone operators were replaced by machines more than 50 years ago. But these displaced workers didn't just rot, they moved into better, more high-paying jobs. Because people have unlimited wants, there will always be new industries popping up to meet new and existing demand.
Posted by: Ben at March 15, 2007 12:42 PMThe need for jobs is something that puzzles me a bit, especially when we consider that there really is abundance (in the U.S. at least). How often do people actually starve here? I don't know any statistics, but even the homeless people in D.C. are relatively well-fed (I've never seen a single one who looked malnourished, and I've seen plenty). There might not be sufficient abundance enough to keep everyone out of squalor, but fed and clothed, yes.
The way it's set up now, people do a lot of jobs that don't really need to be done. I'm primarily thinking of laborers who could be replaced with robots to save time and money, and increase safety. When corporations do this, it's frowned upon because they're cutting jobs, and people get upset. So instead, people get jobs that don't need to be done, at greater cost to the company, and at a reduction in quality of the final product (I'm thinking car companies right now, but it probably applies elsewhere). Eventually, big companies will be better off sticking with the machines and paying people to do nothing.
It'll never happen, but I'd probably be just fine with a society in which only a few people had to work and everyone had enough to eat and live modestly. I'd be fine with it because I'd find plenty of things to do. It'll never happen because most people wouldn't (among other reasons).
Posted by: Dave at March 15, 2007 01:28 PMsci-fi is awesome.
Posted by: daniel at March 15, 2007 01:54 PMto expand, from ray bradbury:
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.
Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
Posted by: daniel at March 15, 2007 02:01 PMBen: I'm entirely okay with creative destruction. I'd love to see Viacom creatively destroyed. What an irony that'd be...
The problem I see is that unlike historical creative destruction where one class of jobs was replaced by another, e.g. factory workers replacing the putting-out system, there aren't new jobs being created.
I myself have no objections to the utopia described by Forster, Blish, and many others in the genre. I just don't think it's possible. Not only is that kind and scale of abundance not feasible, but the utopians don't take into account mankind's endless supply of abject depravity. Most of the people in Camden, NJ are getting enough to eat, but it's still one of the most dangerous, violent locations in the country.
And David: a lot of our current affluence is the result of foreign investment. Almost half of the $8.6 trillion the US government owes is to foreign central banks, and two thirds of that is to Japan and especially China. What happens when China stops buying our bonds?
Posted by: ryan at March 15, 2007 02:37 PMRyan, you wrote: "there aren't new jobs being created." Huh? Evidence? What about the phenomenon of niche markets expanding at an insane rate, each one of those requiring lower skilled labor at some point along the line?
You also wrote: "No amount of technology will ever be able to eliminate scarcity."
Isn't that precisely why there's no need to worry about a loss of demand for labor, in principle?
I do think you're right about this always being the state of affairs, however: "things always on the verge of flying into pieces but never quite doing it." I also think you're right about the evil of class-warfare egalitarianism.
Posted by: nick at March 15, 2007 03:24 PMRyan, I think this is quite perceptive. Sometimes I feel like if I wanted to, I could really worry about the future of our society, but then I sit back and think "What's the point?" Worrying won't fix our problems. I wonder if anything will.
Posted by: Evan Donovan at March 16, 2007 12:34 AM"As civilization advances, it has less and less use for the vast majority of the population that makes up the civilization in question." Perceptive summary of early sci-fi. I wonder, however, if that judgement has been made moote by the gradual realization that technology (here conflated with science) has no necessary correlation to civilization (understood as culture/bildung). I mean, you have to be a bit of a positivist in the old-fashioned sense to maintain a necessary, direct correlation.
Do you see this kind of theme continuing in more recent sci-fi?
Posted by: Richard at March 17, 2007 11:16 PMActually yes, but contemporary sci-fi tends to be a lot darker than early- and classic-era sci-fi. They see the problem, but envision a future where there is no solution and massive numbers of people live on the very edge of society. Alasdair Reynolds' Chasm City and its attendant Inhibitor continuity is a good example of this, where you've got a fraction of the population living in the technological stratosphere of wealth (literally, in fact) with most of the population living in squalor, albeit a squalor punctuated by black market high tech that filters down from the Glitter Band.
I guess most of the contemporary sci-fi I've read recently - or at least can remember off the top of my head - tends to assume rigid stratification of the classes where the elites enjoy unparalleled wealth and comfort and the lives of the billions below them are nasty, brutish, and short. It's worth noting that just about none of them think that the current concept of the nation-state has much of a future.
Posted by: ryan at March 17, 2007 11:52 PM