The End of Industrial Society

Also, because I may want to actually visit the US sometime in the future I've been making a conscious decision not to visit Iran, for example (even though I find Iran to be a beautiful country, at least from the photos I can find on the web). I know there's no explicit "if you have visited Iran you cannot visit the USA anymore" policy coming from the US visa officials, but I feel like that's the direction things are going right now so why risk it?

I too see many issues with "managerial/profit driven development" and true innovation. However, do you suppose that we should remove the profit motive? What do we replace it with? Because unfortunately people seem to fall back to some sort of centralized system like a scientific committee or centralized AI. The problems with these paradigms are even more severe than with corporations.

My take is that involving profits is a way to introduce rules and score keeping to the game. And again, although there are quite a few cheaters, and least there is a game you can play. If you take away the rules and points, you are left with just politics. Or, in the case of a centralized AI, highly concentrated politics related to who controls the AI. And the rest organizing themselves how? Because another part of this equation is that humans are animals and will inevitably construct hierarchies related to mating and resource distribution (just like other animals).

Large scale ultra-local production empowered by things like 3d printing seems to be on its way. But its very far from taking over. And right now, for example, we have a crisis in food production. And the few community gardens we have are negligible in terms of total calories. Also, almost all items, from construction materials to household goods, require oil to produce. Its nice to fantasize about algal oil or something, but large scale deployment is nowhere near here.

To me what could possibly work or at least be a step in the right direction is to use something like advanced cryptocurrency and smart contract technology to reimplement things like money and government in ways that are more fair, cohesive and sane. Combine or even integrate that with truly distributed real time and redundant information systems for large scale data aggregation, visualization and query. My idea is kind of going along the lines of the centralized 1950s style AI, at least as far as being able to get holistic views. But it incorporates modern ideas about the robustness of distributed networks. So we can effectively and transparently share and aggregate global information using peer-to-peer protocols, but not be restricted to a single authoritarian interpretation.

But I am very curious to hear, did you have specific ideas about moving beyond the "managerial/profit driven development"? It just feels like people who want to completely drop money or profit from this usually don't have a great plan. I think most are envisioning a vast network of "intentional communities" where everyone just shares. Again, the reality of that is not going to be as great as you think. Because it means replacing the "game" of profit with just pure politics. Most of the intentional communities become kind of like little cults. Organization will happen one way or another. If there isn't some points accumulation or other structure then you default to manipulation, stabbings, etc.

No. This is Facebook [1], that flappy steam powered umbrella machine that shakes itself to pieces and kills the pilot.

Honestly, I think if there were any reason to think "Industrial society is eating itself", social media (and tech addiction) would be the number one suspects.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_C_sbfyx8

But such ideas often need to be heavily driven by the one with the idea. Even people receptive to the idea often misunderstand such a vision.

So for practical purposes the idea is BS unless the person with the idea is actively working on it. It doesn't need to be proven yet, but if the person with the idea isn't working on it, probably nobody else will.

Sure, sometimes big ideas inspire others, but often the ispiration is more of a winding path rather than a direct "I read this big idea and did it".

Some of the oil states have hit this in a big way. Egypt, for one. Egypt at one time guaranteed employment for all university graduates. That resulted in the government employing a quarter of the workforce. The US is around 14% government, and it's mostly local government - teachers and cops. In the US, this becomes about half the people with college degrees doing jobs that don't need a college degree. A college degree in the US no only no longer guarantees a middle class lifestyle, it may have negative economic value due to debt.

The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional.

We see this in college administration, where the administrator to professor ratio has doubled in 25 years.[1] If you look at pictures of factories from the early 20th century, there's a common pattern - a small administration building in front of a large factory. We no longer see that.

I'd expected the US to hit "peak office" about two decades ago. We may see that now, but it's because of working from home, not a reduced need for white collar work.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...