Is Obama a Luddite?

[The One Man Gang]

From Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: Ludd·ite 
Function: noun
Etymology: perhaps from Ned Ludd, 18th century Leicestershire workman who destroyed a knitting frame
Date: 1811
: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest ; broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change.

Question for the assembly:
Yes, I know Hopenchange can use a "Blackberry" and an "I-Pod." That's irrelevant.  His POLICIES are propping up bloated, centralized companies that have no place in a modern economy.  The future of aviation is not in manned aircraft, it IS being made in dozens of small and medium companies pushing robot technology to its limits.  Companies like Boeing and Lockheed are decentralizing as we sit here pushing product devellopment and decision-making as far down the line as possible, and even that may not be enough.  I look for those companies to start devolving into smaller, lighter entities able to take full advantage of more automated design and production machines.

Listen to Obama's rhetoric, he is talking about MANUFACTURING jobs.  THOSE JOBS DO NOT AND WILL NOT EXIST in a 21st Century economy.  All these pipe dreams about putting hundreds of thousands of people to work building "green" systems ignores the very simple truth that those jobs are going to be done by robots.  A new plant that in 1950 would have employed 5,000 people in 2012 will employ about 50.

Nano-based production techniques currently in advanced development will drop that number even lower.  The factory worker of 2050 will be microscopic.

If the business model we inherited from WWI and WWII (big production, centralized distribution, corporate bureaucrats shuffling piles of paper from one desk to another and so forth) has epic failed in the face of emerging technologies of production and communication, just how in hell does Obama think the maunderings of a 19th Century dilletant (Karl Marx) avoiding the English rain in the London library is going to "make us competetive again?"

At its peak in WWII, Grumman employed over 30,000 people.  They built 15,000 planes.  A similar situation today, with a company taking full advantage of automated design and production techniques would build those 15,000 planes and employ at most a few hundred.

The 21st Century economy is going to be GENETICS, NANOTECHNOLOGY, and ROBOTICS (GNR) based and will spring up from a zillion different sources.  Some will succeed, many will fail.  GOVERNMENT can only impede this process by doing EXACTLY what the Obama administration has been doing for the last six months and Congress and various administrations before that.

Deep question: Is our political system flexible enough to recognize this before the ones who DO understand it shove them into irrelevancy a la the Chicom and Japanese governments?

Deeper question: Is the idea of government itself, at anything beyond the local level (fire, police, schools) obsolete as well? In a world where I can pick up my cell phone an literally talk to anyone in the world, or converse virtually on the Web, is there a place for a centralized government of any kind?

[NCVol]

That's a thoughtful post, OMG, but the question I still have is what, ultimately, creates wealth.

Right now we pretend that wealth is "created" by GS manipulating 0s and 1s arranged in a particular order on a computer screen, while the actual transformation of information and raw materials into goods that we use in our daily lives increasingly occurs in China.  The information workers can benefit from their input, but the less skilled worker add nothing of value to that process, except making change at the WalMart terminal for the small number who still use cash.

If we do go to robot built everything, where labor disappears, what drives wages?  How can we sustain a middle class?  What wage is appropriate for a job that requires nothing more advanced than saying "The TP is in aisle 43." 

And the fact remains that the conversion of information and materials into product will still occur, and I think it is incredibly dangerous and wrongheaded to believe that the fact that it's occurring increasingly often offshore is benign.  We can't forever give China "money" (aka electronic entries into a computer at the BOC) in exchange for clothes and electronics and other goods.  Eventually, either the world becomes ONE, one government, one currency, or the U.S. collapses.  I don't see a sustainable alternative to us producing (manufacturing) our own goods. 

I'll have to think about further, but the reality is THIS kind of debate should be taking place among the smartest leaders the U.S. has to offer.  That it's not is incredibly disappointing to me. 

I hear "recovery" and I don't see where it can possibly come from, in part because of trends the post recognizes.  Why doesn't anyone ask and try to answer that simple, but fundamental question? 

[Jeremy Roenick]

Deeper question: Is the idea of government itself, at anything beyond the local level (fire, police, schools) obsolete as well?

The Federal government no longer functions for the people.  It might as well be obsolete.  But then the puppet masters who run everything wouldn't have their proxies in place to govern, now would they.

Recovery will take years NC.  Construction projects and green technologies through the stimulus plan are akin to throwing a cup of water on a raging house fire.

[Shimmy]

I hear "recovery" and I don't see where it can possibly come from, in part because of trends the post recognizes.  Why doesn't anyone ask and try to answer that simple, but fundamental question? 

I know...times are so hard whatever are we gonna do?

Here's a simple fundamental question for you.  Why do you believe everything the socialists tell you?

[NCVol]

I know...times are so hard whatever are we gonna do?

Here's a simple fundamental question for you.  Why do you believe everything the socialists tell you?

Here is what I have learned.  When people have a proven track record of being CORRECT on stocks, on economic fundamentals, on growth, unemployment, etc. and they base their opinions on FACTS, and do so without any noticeable regard to political affiliation, I listen to them. 

I have quit listening to assholes who have made a career out of being wrong. 

And I don't know which ones of those who have a proven track record of being CORRECT are "socialists," but I do know what they ALL believe and that is the worst is not behind us.  Not by a long shot, and since they have been right more often than not before, and base their opinions on FACTS and EVIDENCE that I can review and evaluate, I believe them. 

You can do what you want.   

[NCVol]

Recovery will take years NC.  Construction projects and green technologies through the stimulus plan are akin to throwing a cup of water on a raging house fire.

My problem is seeing where "recovery" comes from even years down the road. 

Wages have been declining on a real basis for a decade by the official numbers, longer than that using unofficial and arguably more accurate numbers, that trend should accelerate through this recession, what will reverse it? 

Somehow production will move back home, I'd suppose, but how we get there is a mystery to me. 

[Jeremy Roenick]

Somehow production will move back home, I'd suppose, but how we get there is a mystery to me.

It could take a war.  It's in our best interest from a national security standpoint to have that manufacturing capacity within our borders. 

If the Chinese ever decide to cut us off and that they can self sustain their economy domestically through their own consuption, we are screwed with a capital "S".  I've heard people say this will never happen.  Don't be so sure?  When have the Chinese either acted rationally or wisely?

[The One Man Gang]

Boys, I think you are missing the point.

Posit a global war - WWII scale - in the 21st Century.

The US mobilized 16-point-something million men. A minority (>30%) of those wound up in combat.

A 10,000 light cruiser of 1944 (Cleveland-class - CL-55) had a crew of roughly 1200 and could control the sea over a radius of about 10 miles and had no anti-sub capability.

The new DDG 112 Michael Murphy, a Burke-class guided missile destroyer, displaces @9000 tons, can control the sea and air to a radius of about 300 miles and on up into space and has an extensive anti-sub capability and has a crew of 150.

The follow-on ships of the Burke-class will have even fewer crew.

The USS Gerald R. Ford  (CVN-78) will have a crew 1500 fewer than the G.H.W. Bush (CVN-77) which was just commissioned.

The shipyards that build those carriers and destroyers employ far, far, fewer workers per thousand tons than they did in WWII.

And that's with 1980s technology and endless battles with unions over newer manfacturing techniques.

Bottom line: noipe, ain't gonna happen, ain't gonna help.  Face it we ARE fighting a global war right now and doing so with a total military srength of less than 2 million.   

The domestic auto manufacturers are stuck somewhere around 1970.

But even that is beside the point.

In the next few years, robots and nanobots are going to (and there's no way to stop this) become SELF-REPLICATING and SELF-ORGANIZING and able to re-arrange matter on a molecular scale.  In fact they already are doing so in the lab.  What the import of that is that those nano-machines will be able to funtion much like ants, allowing for the failure of an individual part while achieving the success of the overall process.  These will be controlled by wireless technology (already available at a "McDonald's" near you) for control purposes. 

It is just possible that money is obsolete as well as in the future information and sheer computing power will be the "coin of the realm."  Ray Kurweil makes a strong case in his book The Singularity is Near that within the next decade a computer will be built (indeed AFIK it's already being designed - largely by other computers) that will exceed the capacity of a human brain.  Within 5-10 years after that, a single super-computer will exceed the capacity of ALL existing human brains, combined. He's not talking a century or so down the road.  He's talking NO LATER than 2025.  "GOOGLE" is already working on a system to use idle power from PC's, I-Pods, netbooks, etc., to power the internet and form an enormous self-organizing super-computer of vast capacity.  The idea is that when your whatever is connect to the net, you are using only a minimal amount of your systems total power.  The goal is to devise a program that would enable "the net" to share server functions with the idle processing and memory in your machine.  In a wierd way the hackers are already doing this when they install "spam-bots" in you e-mail program to send out messages from a huge number of sources.  Same idea but more benign.

If Google or whoever is successful in this, and I have no doubt they will be, Kurzweil's 2025 horizon will get a LOT closer.  There was a trial balloon sent up a few weeks ago in which some gearhead (maybe a GOOGLE exec?) was pointing out that the capacity of existing stand-alone servers was about to be reached and that another technology would be needed to keep the 'net running. 

Related article: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6169488.ece

Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India.

<snip>

Engineers are already preparing for the worst. While some are planning a lightning-fast parallel network called “the grid”, others are building “caches”, private computer stations where popular entertainments are stored on local PCs rather than sent through the global backbone.

[NCVol]

Well, then what is life like on the other side of that? 

The New World Order types believe it will mean the intentional extinction of 95% or more of the world population, a handful of extremely powerful elites, a smaller, but huge majority of an underclass whose sole function is to serve their overlords. 

It's certainly not clear that any traditional political or economic system is remotely prepared to deal with the fallout of the vast majority of the world becoming, literally, useless to society, as would anyone not at the top of his or her knowledge field. 

[The One Man Gang]

Actually, more like "The Matrix" scene where Neo suddenly realizes "I know Kung Fu!" after the appropriate program is downloaded into his brain.

In this future ANYONE can be at the top of ANY "knowledge field" whenever they want, or need, to be.  They are already "reverse engineering" the human brain and within a very few years your web browser is going to be some sort of cross between a cochlear implant and monocle.  You will be consantly "on-line" receiving and transmitting information at the speed of thought. 

Let's say you need to do research on the aerodynamics of a hummingbird.  Twenty-five years ago, you had to go to local library, paw through the card file and head over to the appropriate sections to (hopefully) find something germain to your research. If you were lucky the research alone would require at least a day and perhaps several.

How would you do that now?  Think about it.

You can now access the biology departments of universities from around the country and around the world with just a few keystrokes.  You can send an e-mail enquiry to noted experts in the field and somebody out there has a computer simulation of just how a hummingbird's wing works and you can download it in a few minutes.  IOW, just about EVERYTHING man knows about hummingbirds is literally at your fingertips.  Now imagine not having to use a keyboard, a mouse, or anything other than forming the thought "hummingbird aerodynamics."

Now imagine an AI "Jeeves" who will search the web and then dowload the info right into your synapses. Kurzweil foresses a fusion of biological (human) intelligence with non-biological intelligence.  He indicates, to me at least, (and God knows I don't want to trigger one of these "I know more obscure Bible verses than you do" thingies) that this fusion is the next stage of human evolution.  Once the machines we have created are REALLY smarter than we (and by that I mean the entire human race) are, we will have no choice. We can either join them and exert enhanced human control, or become pond scum.

In such a system tradional economic and political structures aren't just obsolete, they are meaningless.

"Facebook" is already taking steps in that direction:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2adf1976-4f91-11de-a692-00144feabdc0.html

Facebook has begun tapping a new revenue stream with the introduction of an internal payments system, a move that might help the fast-growing social networking website achieve profitability while being less reliant on advertising.

The long-rumoured payments system, which is in its early stages, will allow users to purchase Facebook “credits”, then use those credits to buy virtual goods from the third-party applications that run on the site, or from Facebook itself.

Facebook hopes that by offering a site-wide currency it will encourage more commerce on the website. By serving as the payment provider, it will capture a percentage of every transaction.

I cannot recommend Kurweil's book enough. I'm currently about 2/3 way through it and to say it is illuminating, even if I don't agree with everything, is an understatement. There is a movie in the works as well.

http://singularity.com/