[tt] [FoRK] Dude, where’s my job?

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Stephen Williams <sdw at lig.net> -----

From: Stephen Williams <sdw at lig.net>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:41:32 -0800
To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>
Subject: Re: [FoRK] Dude, where’s my job?
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Macintosh/20081209)
Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>

Eugen Leitl wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 04:25:30PM -0500, bill stoddard wrote:
>  
>...
>>can keep the moralizing and finger pointing.
>>    
>
>Blame games are boring. I'm more interested in emerging technologies 
>to make energy, resource and demography work again, world wide. 
>_______________________________________________
>  

Exactly.  1) Make and distribute cheap energy (or distribute making 
cheap energy).  2) Make effective automation with intelligence.  With 
those two, you get plentiful, cheap water, agriculture, manufacturing, 
building, homesteading formerly inhospitable locales both inland and at 
sea.  That solves food, living space, quality of life, and subhuman 
(i.e. drudge manufacturing, farming) labor needs.  Completely doable, 
and these things start changing most of the rules at some inflection point.

In other words, many key issues can be solved with enough energy and 
automation (where automation includes leveraging human intelligence in 
various ways).

Hopefully you avoid a population explosion until you are ready to go 
offworld.  We really need a reform / modernization plan for a number of 
countries with various issues including having 5 children per woman.

On 2's path:
Robotics on the Vine
Vision Robotics' $150,000 grape-pruning prototype combines software, 
machine vision capabilities, and robotics
http://www.mechatronicszone.com/articles/all_articles.php?art_id=1547&lp_id=78&nid=3198&rid=1222082

Now, it is important to stop people from being asses before you get too 
far down this path as better technology starts becoming more and more 
potentially dangerous, peaking at gray goo perhaps.  Somehow, 
regressive, hostile, and obstructive people have to be brought into the 
modern world.  Ideally, by carrot: the healthy side starts running away 
with riches in multiple senses while the sick side languishes explicitly 
because they are stubborn.

This points to a policy of withholding this technology on an 
anti-nuclear proliferation like basis.  Since this should include a 
number of Arab countries that have lots of money, this is probably not 
workable.  And it gets into too much moralizing perhaps, but I'd vote 
for it.  Clean tech for clean countries (laws, policies, cultural 
tolerance (i.e. informal law and practices)).

Stephen

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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