Catastrophes

Every time some corner of the world suffers a new catastrophe the media reviews all the major ones of recent years: Katrina, Sandy, Sandyhook, now the latest-Nepal. Meantime there are the chronic ones, like the wars in Africa and the Middle East that go on and on, assorted hurricanes and typhoons, droughts like the one devastating the food growing farms of California. 

Something that strikes me about the responses to such catastrophes is how the survivors immediately rebuild the same buildings, the same infrastructure – as what was just destroyed. Why not build multi-family buildings of concrete and steel that can withstand 200 mile per hour winds? To make that affordable, of course, many families would have to agree to occupy condos, and thus get the benefit of group solutions. They would have to learn to debate and cooperate with neighbors in group management.

I think I know part of the answer. We humans are creatures of habit, we get used to what we have had before and don’t feel comfortable with having to adapt to changed conditions. I can understand this concretely in my own experience of such a simple thing as having to learn the rules of a new Windows environment on my computer. I don’t want to spend time learning a new way to set up to write a blog or a book, even though they theoretically would lead to more efficiency. I just want to keep doing my work with the habits I have gotten used to. How much more important, then, to keep living in the same house, or one as similar to your old one as possible – in the same area, the same neighborhood.

We can see this principle at work too, I believe, in the recent wave of “conservative” political movement in many countries around the world, including our own. I remember reading an interview in which a reporter asked a young woman after an election—I believe it was in Turkey—why she had voted for the conservative party, even though they proposed things she did not favor,  “I just want things to go back to the way they were,” she had replied.  New ideas about many public policies that have come upon the globe in the last half century too fast for many people. They might appeal to intellectuals and entrepreneurs, but for many ordinary people the reaction is just like my reluctance to learn new Windows rules.

The Need for Long-run Future Planning

There are many problems looming in the future that seem not to be considered by the people who run things. Why is that?

I saw a TV ad today of a car-building assembly line manned by a bunch of robots. I got the impression that the makers of the ad thought that we, the audience, would by impressed or filled with admiration for the efficiency of the robots. Well, I have news for them. The reaction it provoked in me was to wonder how are the people who used to do that supposed to make a living now? Should they cash in their pension to go back to school at the age of fifty or fifty five and learn computer programming? A programmer I know got laid off as her company shipped her job to Asia.

The owners of the car business think their job is to make the biggest profit they can for their shareholders (themselves, included). O K, that is the theory of capitalism. Competition inspires people to be continuously as efficient as possible. Anyone who loses his job in the process should either find a new one or create a new business to become a capitalist himself. Fine; but if a million people are thrown out of work, does anyone believe there would be a need for a million new businesses, even imagining for a moment that every one of those laid off workers could be that creative.

The attitude comes, I believe, from a perfectly natural way of thinking. Back in prehistory, when the population of the earth was small and scattered, people dropped their waste outside their usual precincts and the environment disposed of it. They did not have to deal with plastics that are unnatural in the sense that some of them never deteriorate.

So, humans can no longer trust the environment to return their waste to raw material. But no one has come up with a definitive solution for that problem. Instead different “interest groups” fight over who should take responsibility to get rid of such waste products and who should pay for it..  As the debate goes on the problems grow exponentially worse.

So now we see two growing problems—the accumulation of undigested waste around the world, and the accumulation of unemployment that will never by reduced as robots are employed to replace humans on a continually increasing pattern. There was an article in Sunday’s New York Times, “The Machines are Coming,” that described how the old solutions—where laid-off workers learn new, more complex skills—are no longer working. I believe we need something much more fundamental: a revolutionary attitude that getting more jobs is not the answer. The world simply does not need all the available workers, so why not agree that the machines should provide all the needs of living, and humans consume them freely and spend their (our) time on creative activities—art, science, song and dance. I read somewhere that the Polynesians lived like that. It required a couple hours a day to supply their needs—that were furnished by their lush natural environment—and spent most of their time adventuring or creating.

So why not?

Of course, there is a third issue—the one that might make the others irrelevant: global warming. If we are indeed approaching a deadline beyond which the earth will become uninhabitable it is fair to ask the legislators who are preventing doing anything about it WHY?

Robots

There have been a number of articles lately about the promise of robots, but they have so far not benefited everyone, as they are owned by a few large corporations that have not shared. So how do we solve that?