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From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Future Work
Message-ID: <1990Apr14.065358.18844@intercon.com>
Date: 14 Apr 90 06:53:58 GMT
References: <9004101958.AA23998@stdc.jhuapl.edu> <1472@gara.une.oz.au> <1990Apr12.203832.17512@cs.rochester.edu> <1481@gara.une.oz.au> <22574@cs.yale.edu>
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Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
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In article <22574@cs.yale.edu>, Rob Jellinghaus writes:
> No technology, no matter how advanced, can avoid the problems of
> exponential population increase, leading to ultimate overpopulation.

Well, space travel has always been my personal favorite, since even if
it does not avoid the problem completely, it at least increases the
solution space by a lot.  It's only problem (so far) is the huge amount
of energy you need to climb out of the gravity well, even only as far
as low Earth orbit.

Don't get me wrong--I think that overpopulation is a real danger, and that
current global attitudes about it are almost suicidal.  I just would like
to think that we aren't restricted to Gaia, beautiful as she is.

> But there are far too many people who don't see things our way to make me
> sanguine about solving the problem by changing people's lifestyles en
> masse.)

This, I think, is the central factor in the crisis.  The first step in
solving a problem is accepting that it exists, and far too many people
either (a) don't admit that human civilization is in trouble (thanks in
particular to post-renaissance Western European ideas about "progress"),
or (b) that it matters.  Remember James Watt?  He didn't *care* about
the environment, because in his world-view, the Earth wasn't going to be
around much longer anyway.  I find this scary.

Nanotechnology holds a lot of promise.  So does telecommunications
technology, which is only just starting to change people's patterns of
behavior in this country (I think the inventor of celluar radio deserves
to be rich for life, for example).  However, all of the technology in
the world, no matter how cheap and clean, will have little effect until
and unless it fires the imagination of the general public, and that doesn't
always work the way anyone expects.

Imagine, if you will, a charismatic televangelist deciding that nanomachines
are a tool of Satan?  It'll make book-burning and protests against
recombinant DNA experimentation look like a summer picnic...

--
Amanda Walker, InterCon Systems Corporation
--
"Y'know, you can't have, like, a light, without a dark to stick it in...
 You know what I'm sayin'?"     --Arlo Guthrie