GW_Justice wrote >>
I know that Mana is not a great story on a literary level. It suffers from a lot of exposition to describe the technological changes, and shortchanges the character development. I included a number of other books that are better in the post for this reason.
I've never read Vonnegut, I'll admit. As for Wells and The Time Machine, since that one deals in the realm of a million years or so (not to mention the concept of time travel, which is one of the least theoretically possible innovations in sci-fi, along with FTL travel), it's qualitatively different than Manna.
It is plausible that we could move a great deal of completely automated manufacturing activity underground. The issue with Wells is that he posited that we would need to have large numbers of people living underground full-time in order to man those underground factories. Wells therefore drastically underestimated the pace of automation, which was an understandable error for an 1895 author. We will have fully automated factories long before we move a significant amount of manufacturing underground to save more desirable surface space. Indeed, the enormous excavations required to move that much future industry underground may well themselves be automated. Therefore, the development of a Morlock/Eloi divergence in human evolution is highly unlikely. To the extent that there is future speciation in Homo sapiens, it is actually more likely to be done consciously due to revolutions in genetic engineering than to happen naturally over millions of years. The one way it could happen naturally would be due to the extremely environmental divergence from exoplanetary settlement--something else that is a very, very long way in the future.
It is short, and it covers the problems that we have now and will have more of in the near future.
"Covers" may be a little bit of a reach. It describes what might best be called two diametrically opposed possible endpoints of the automation revolution.
It stretches beyond plausibility when it posits the "Good" endpoint as inevitably tied to an egalitarian revolution with perfect redistribution of income (complete with not-so-subtle socialist digs against profit and private property), while the "Bad" endpoint is posited as the endpoint of free enterprise.
American business is about making money for the investors. It is not about employing people, unless the additional person makes more money for the company.
This much is true.
As new technology reduces the need for employees, they will be fired. Then what? Work in fast food? Sorry.
http://news.foodfacts.info/2006/02/automated-ordering-at-taco-bellkfc.html
I can pull up similar links for any service job that you might suggest for replacement work.
On this point, I don't think that Manna is too farfetched. As I said in my earlier post, fast food operations are production operations--factories--as much as culinary ones. It could be possible to have a fully automated fast food joint. In fact, an automated fast food joint might have an added advantage in that it could take up very little space, even if it offered on-site seating. We have a vending machine at the office that can sell you a chicken sandwich that you just throw in the microwave that's not so different from a fast food chicken patty. Add the ability to grab fries and a fountain drink and you've got a McDonald's replacement that can go in your office kitchen.
If you don't think the story Mana is plausible, please tell be what jobs will be created to replace all of the jobs lost to automation and high level computerized systems.
You can't use my inability to see the future as justification for your own vision or anyone else's. That simply means that I'm more modest about the limits of my prescience, not that your crystal ball is better than mine. However, we survived the shift from an agrarian to a manufacturing society. We have so far survived the transition from a manufacturing to a service society. Given that track record, and my general faith in humanity, I have little doubt that we will survive the last of the transition away from manufacturing, as well as future transitions away from low-end service work.
I don't know what the future holds. However, these past major social and economic transitions have caused social unrest--but have also caused tremendous booms in societal wealth and income. This growth has gone more towards the top than the bottom, but the real gains in living standards have been broadly shared because of technological progress.
If I had to take a guess, I would guess that America will move towards something that in many respects resembles Australia from the books technologically, but not economically, because those who develop the kinds of technological advancements that Australia had in Manna will profit most by commercializing those technologies broadly. Do you think Apple would have enjoyed the run it has had these past ten years if the iPod were $5,000? Look at the top Fortune 500 companies and you almost never find companies that cater towards the super-rich. You find companies that have succeeded in efficiently delivering valuable products to countless millions.
That means that access to the real-world "Vertebrane"--the cybernetic future Internet, however it evolves--is likely to be economically little different than Internet or cell phone access today: you'll pay a service provider a flat monthly fee for it. There will be both open-source and proprietary programs on it, just like computer programs and iPhone/Android applications today. It is entirely possible that home computers with the processing power of the human brain will also be linked into the same network, either as psychological agents in their own right or extensions of our own minds--allowing everyone the ability to effectively carry a supercomputer around with them. (Ray Kurzweil has described a process of gradually "merging" with our technology.) Even if these kinds of changes are only partially realized, the potential for geometric increases in human achievement and standards of living would be enormous.
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