We end up in a world overpopulated by slackers because no one needs jobs or works and instead of enlightening themselves with all of this free time, they end up spending 20 hours a day playing the XBOX 72021 and the hot new game Call of Duty 42.
I don't think we need to worry about a future, or more specifically you won't need to worry about the future.
I've read Rifkin's "End of Work" and it seems so entirely plausible.
As things become more mechanized and computerized, the less need there will be for corporations to hire people. What happens when we make robots that can work mines, plow fields or make car parts. I mean machines are already doing most of those jobs already... the average farmer feeds 130 people, compared to just 25 in 1960.
In Rifkin's "End of Work", there is 90% unemployment. Oh, the machines can make thousands of cars, we will have more food than we can imagine, we'll have plenty of everything... and nobody will be able to afford any of it. The top 1% will have riches that can't compare to Bill Gates's wealth in terms of material possessions and assets. The unemployed 90% will end up begging for scraps.
It makes sense that a species motivated by greed and fear would end up there. However, if you read Rifkin's wikipedia page, there are a lot of groups that disagree with his ideas.... the idea that Capitalism could take us to the exact same place as Orwell's 1984 Communism isn't going to be accepted very easily. But I can see where Rifkin was coming from. If more technology creates a period of abundance and less work - who the heck says that that abundance is going to be shared equitably?
I've read Rifkin's "End of Work" and it seems so entirely plausible.
As things become more mechanized and computerized, the less need there will be for corporations to hire people. What happens when we make robots that can work mines, plow fields or make car parts. I mean machines are already doing most of those jobs already... the average farmer feeds 130 people, compared to just 25 in 1960.
In Rifkin's "End of Work", there is 90% unemployment. Oh, the machines can make thousands of cars, we will have more food than we can imagine, we'll have plenty of everything... and nobody will be able to afford any of it. The top 1% will have riches that can't compare to Bill Gates's wealth in terms of material possessions and assets. The unemployed 90% will end up begging for scraps.
It makes sense that a species motivated by greed and fear would end up there. However, if you read Rifkin's wikipedia page, there are a lot of groups that disagree with his ideas.... the idea that Capitalism could take us to the exact same place as Orwell's 1984 Communism isn't going to be accepted very easily. But I can see where Rifkin was coming from. If more technology creates a period of abundance and less work - who the heck says that that abundance is going to be shared equitably?
If there is 90% unemployment, who is going to use the coal, eat the food and use the car parts that the robots produce?
And the guys at the top will have 7 houses and forget how many they have. So it will be very different than today.
Are the guys at the top just going to be buying from each other?
Even the most fabulously wealthy and wasteful 10% won't be able to consume enough (and pay each other enough) to make up for the 90% who have nothing. They'll need our money to be rich.
The automobile industry, for example -- it wouldn't be able to sustain itself if only 1 person in 10 can buy a car, even if the rich people buy several.
I've read Rifkin's "End of Work" and it seems so entirely plausible.
As things become more mechanized and computerized, the less need there will be for corporations to hire people. What happens when we make robots that can work mines, plow fields or make car parts. I mean machines are already doing most of those jobs already... the average farmer feeds 130 people, compared to just 25 in 1960.
In Rifkin's "End of Work", there is 90% unemployment. Oh, the machines can make thousands of cars, we will have more food than we can imagine, we'll have plenty of everything... and nobody will be able to afford any of it. The top 1% will have riches that can't compare to Bill Gates's wealth in terms of material possessions and assets. The unemployed 90% will end up begging for scraps.
It makes sense that a species motivated by greed and fear would end up there. However, if you read Rifkin's wikipedia page, there are a lot of groups that disagree with his ideas.... the idea that Capitalism could take us to the exact same place as Orwell's 1984 Communism isn't going to be accepted very easily. But I can see where Rifkin was coming from. If more technology creates a period of abundance and less work - who the heck says that that abundance is going to be shared equitably?
I never read Rifkin's End of Work (I'm facinated now) but a limiting factor to these robots doing this work has to be energy. Are they going to be solar powered? If so, that limits how much work they can do, and where they can do it. Are they battary powered? Resources are getting depleted as it is.
I for one don't see "robots" ever being our servants. I do, however, see computer technology and industrial processes run by computer technology taking jobs away though.
Definately agree with the separation between the rich and everyone else being a huge problem.
__________________
"With a coach and a player, sometimes there's just so much respect there that it's boils over"
-Taylor Hall
Some interesting predictions for the future in this thread indeed. I wouldn't go out on a limb and argue a sucessful incarnation of socialism is in our future. However I think that the continual taking away of civil liberties will be the biggest socialogical change in the future. Fact is both sides of the political map endorse increased censorship and suspended civil liberties for very different reasons (Either social engineering or increased security purposes), but the end result it won't matter which reason prevails but rather that we'll be less free. Whether it is revisions to the patriot act, closed circut cameras everywhere, human rights kangaroo courts, tighter hate speech legislation, the net effect is more invasions of privacy and less freedom.
Location: In a land without pants, or war, or want. But mostly we care about the pants.
Exp:
Nanotech + fusion power = a culture of abundance. All current cultures and systems of government are attempts to deal with scarcity, so it is almost unimaginable what such a culture might be like: it could be utopia, dystopia, a long decline into irrelevance, or a trigger that sends us among the stars.
Or all four at once, plus extras.
__________________
Better educated sadness than oblivious joy.
A somewhat related and very interesting site: Exit Mundi
It covers just about every possible, realistic doomsday scenario for mankind; from something that could happen tomorrow to the heat death of the universe. Some interesting ones already discussed in this thread:
Gray goo, one possible outcome from self-assembling nano-technology.
Nanotech is something I got to become intimately familiar with during my undergrad degree (alot of coarses in nanotech process engineering, fabrication, and so on) ... nanotechnology is really a buzzword. And, its got alot of hype these days.
Just what is nanotechnology?
Nanoelectronics? (i.e. Ballistic Nanotransistor and Nanowires)
Carbon Nanotubes?
MEMS? (micro-electrical mechanical machines, I did an internship at a fab making MEMS)
Nanoscale biomarkers? (i.e. quantum dots)
Nanoparticules for drug delivery? (almost did my masters here, actually)
Nanopores for reading genes and proteins? (how much of this is considered technology vs biology?)
Nanomachines?
Nanotools?
Spintronics?
etc
Differing some from the rest... there are some I believe in succeeding in the world, some I believe succeeding in R&D but never makes it to production and some that may be the limit of what man can do.
In industry, fabrication and testing is a huge issue in nanotechnology. Wafer yeilds (electronics are made on a wafer) are low as it is, and making electronics even smaller is an exponentially bigger issue. On the processing side, printing patterns onto wafers (i.e. photolithography) is at EUV right now I believe (extreme UV, just lower the deep UV) to get finer features on a mask. (This process is similar to developing film) On the design side, when it comes to electronics, heat dissipation is a huge issue; I believe currently 80% of the energy is dissipated in heat/waste - and its the fundamental science of a transistor, so there's no real way around it - EE's on this board, thats your saturation current in reverse-bias. For the nano-wires... impedance, wires interfering with each other (aka "cross talk") And then there is testing, where probing such small devices does destroy them and lowers its die yield - but there is R&D into wireless probing, a technology that is very much Canadian. So, thats my opinion on nanoelectronics.
Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs), last time I checked, they were still building them by accuracy-by-volume and had difficulty processing the rolling of carbon graphite into a tube (thus, "nanotube"). Last I checked, plasma was being used to have better process control, but thats still in R&D. (I almost got involved in a project doing this, but was a final cut of sorts) CNTs seem to be more popular and exploited for its mechanical qualities then their electrical possibilities ... like making golf clubs and tennis rackets.
MEMS are already used, of coarse... car breaks, Wii's to name a few. They arn't really "nano" though, still very much micro. Probing is the issue here.
And the rest, Nanoscale sensing devices... they really integrate chemistry and biology more then high tech, so I guess it depends what you mean by "nanotechnology" ... of all of them, I believe drug delivery has the greatest potential of revolutionary science making its way into real world application. The idea of using drug delivery to target specific areas with 1/1000 amount of drug with 100x's better efficiency and significantly minimizing side effects - well, there's got to be demand for that.
Sorry for sounding debbie-downer in my tone, just giving my opinion.
__________________
"With a coach and a player, sometimes there's just so much respect there that it's boils over"
-Taylor Hall
Last edited by Phanuthier; 10-21-2008 at 03:01 AM.
Well the gray-goo scenario really has nothing to do with the production of nano-devices. I read an article in SciAm (I think) about a process being worked on to produce what is effectively nano-circuits. It was a while back and I'm a musician so I'll spare you my vague recollections.
In any case I was surprised to learn that nanotechnology has much more to do with the decreasing of size of "microtechnology" (I guess) and much less to do with the science-fiction portrayal of it, which are sort of nano-robots.
One particularly cool idea I came across was a mutable, centrally-controlled "nano-goo". Billions of nano "blocks" would take assembly commands from some kind of computer and assemble themselves into superstructures large enough to be physically significant to humans. This would enable things such as re-configurable furniture, houses, cars, clothes, and so forth. The nano-blocks would be able to create structures with different colors, textures, and so forth.
Medical nano-technology is another of that sci-fi style. A horde of nano drones is injected into someone's bloodstream as a new kind of antibody or a cancer-fighting "strike force" or to repair damaged tissue or help relieve clogged arteries or who knows what. Medical nano-robots could potentially repair damage to systems that are currently unable to be healed, such as hearing loss.
Of course this is all very pie-in-the-sky style futurism. Neat though! Sorry I don't have anything useful to contribute to actual nanotechnology, though.
Don't be sorry, I enjoy talking about stuff like this.
First off ... the gray goo. I read the link, and I wasn't sure what type of science they were basing this off of, so I was assuming they were going with some sort of idea of a intelligent machine (AI) that could assemble itself. And self-assembly isn't too pie-in-the-sky, but I have trouble understanding how one goes about the process engineering and design engineering of one of these little buggers. (i.e. nano-circuit)
The self-assembly ... about a year ago, I was talking to a girl who was doing her PhD in some sort of self-assembling mesh-satellite idea, so that instead of firing up a satellite in its entirety, it assembles itself. Pretty cool, I forgot most of what she was saying and probably wasn't paying too much attention anyways cause she was pretty hot, especially for an engineer.
I know MIT has some sort of competition to design and build an idea of this nano goo you suggest, something called nanoblocks or nanobricks or something like that.
As you said, nanotechnology is essentially decreasing the size of microtechnology, but as I said, we have an escalating problem when we get to grain size of silicon. (aka the smallest lego of a bunch of lego used to build a electrical switch, a transistor). Getting to where we are now was a little simpler in just scaling down the science, but now we're approaching new science fundimentals - so if nanoelectronics really did ever find its niche in this world, the science of it is very different then microelectronics*. I believe thats ~20nm (?) and we're pushing that now (Intel and AMD are 2 leading there). And as I said, the issues are on many levels... process engineering, how the hell do you do it, when we use shorter wavelength lasers to make smaller patterns, do the photolithography chemicals (aka the normal camera photo chemicals) work for that wavelength of light? ... and design engineering, things like electrical components interfering with each other, and the bigger pressing issue, heat dissipation. In laymans terms example, your cell phone: if you charge it up to its max, leave it sitting for a couple years then try turning your cell phone on, it probably won't turn on. Thats because electronics are so small that leakage (in the sense of water leakage) of power is an issue, leakage current.
Point * emphasized, to go from milli-electronics to microelectronics was simply scaling down process concepts to do whatever we wanted to do. To go from microelectronics to nanoelectronics is a different science, because instead of dealing with electrical engineering concepts, they're now atomic physics concepts.
Also ... nanotechnology is pretty high maintainance. The conditions they can operate in (environmental conditions), how they receive their power, how they interface with other instrumentation and the real world isn't so "nano" and for the small-ness of the device, they usually require big electronics to do so - rending the science more of an academic exercise then real world application.
Process engineering, though, and I harp on this alot for good reason, is what makes the difference between technology being an academic exercise and having it make it to the real world. For something to make it to production, it needs to have proven processing concepts that comply with the instrumentation we have to make them. This is another major hurdle I see these nanomachines hitting.
Now, if this goo you suggest is organic (i.e. biological), thats a different story. (Genetically engineered? See my post in the tech forum, there was some news on that this past week) An infestation of this would scare the hell out of me, though.
Now medical nanotechnology ... these I believe in, in 100 years. You look at the size/volume/wealth of the pharmacy business ... money will be spent if there is seen to be a need for it. I don't feel consumer products really get that same luxury. The idea of nano drones as an idea seems a little out there, but the science is quite simpler then nanoelectronics, IMO. Alot of it appears to be more chemistry and biology based, taking away some of those process engineering issues I previously spoke about. The ability to control thens in vivo through an external source (microwaves, radio waves, THz, etc) makes this idea practical.
Using "nanotechnology" as a buzzword for small electronics, in terms of medical technology, I believe we will see medical diagnostics out into consumer products bought at the local London Drugs for $10 in, say, 10 years - lab on a chip, a well known and ancient science by cutting-edge standards, we are nearing the stage where its becoming practical for it to be sold at London Drugs and Shoppers Drug Mart. Drug delivery is still immature, but I believe it has a future for the reasons stated above
(Again sorry if I seem to depressing the idea, I'm mostly just engaging the topics from a critical POV. A "smart" goo that could assemble into anything would be pretty cool though.)
__________________
"With a coach and a player, sometimes there's just so much respect there that it's boils over"
-Taylor Hall
