In Vivo Veritas

How does the Galactic Capital City/Planet work? It struck me the other day that Coruscant - the city-planet on which all that boring diplomatic stuff happens in the first three Star Wars films - has no economy. Well, not a monetary-based one anyway. I know of course that there is nothing outside the text but I wondered if this was possibly the future for humanity on this very-real planet, where technology has taken over almost all the work that we at present get paid for. Sooner or later our technology is going to get to a point where no one actually has to do anything other than think - and even that will go out of the window. Will we then live in a paradise of permanent leisure where everyone just gets and does what they want without any need for the money to do so? Of course we won't. Wouldn't it be lovely though? Someone I know - until recently a Maggie fan of the highest order - has started suggesting that a world based on a monetary economy is doomed to failure (something to do with debt apparently - maybe he has a point there) and we should work towards one based on barter and resource. From what I remember, the governments of the world have done their best to monetise any resource-based economy by taxing payment in kind so we can't all just go off and start swapping our abilities without handing over money and expect no not get a visit from Mister Inland Revenue ... which is a pity. Of course if the point at which the technology makes such a world possible coincides with the point at which our consciousness can be absorbed into the machines, such laws would need a radical overhaul anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to set up the robots with a few unimpeachable regulations and let them get on with the boring stuff of keeping the world happy without them having to worry about being actually paid for it. Sorry - not a good thought is it. Bye for now.

Bear With!

There are some people I take an instant dislike to. I know I shouldn't and many times actually verbal discourse with someone about whom I have made such a hasty judgement reveals them to be perfectly normal or indeed actually quite likeable. However, there are some people who build up a catalogue of misdemeanours which over time render them unlikeable. Unfortunately the Internet is rife with both types of people which is why I never really comment on anything. The keyboard, various wires and the amorphous collection of servers that separate your average casual browser of news and blogs seems to give them courage to troll and flame without any of the consideration that even the most ribald of conversationalists would give for someone they met face-to-face yet who they disagreed with. A sensitive soul like me would be reduced to jelly by just one of the milder ripostes that punctuate cyberspace discourse.

Ad hominem attacks just to destroy the character of an online commenter are rife - it seems a badge of honour to use the most horrible slander (I suppose technically it is libel) giving the impression that that the author is some sort of shaven-headed football goon or a slathering red militant with a badge saying "This Keyboard Kills Fascists!". (As you can tell I live in a small hut perched a-top Vince Cable's fence). However, thinking about it and matching up some of these tools with videos, I have determined that in reality the worst of them are actually the quiet kids from school who have grown up seething with years of abuse about their haircuts, their funny voices, their obsessions and everything else that makes us different from one another, until they have found the safe medium with its remote bunkers from where they can lob stones and mud at the bullies without fear of being beaten up in return. If you want to be Freudian about it you might determine that a lot of their abuse casts light on their own fears about themselves as well, though I'm not sure how much that would stand up to scrutiny.

I would link to some of the muddy cyberswamps which are populated by these squeaky-voiced children but I think it would be more fun for you to have a guess at who I mean. It is possible to be quite right or left wing without being childish. The trouble is that these guys are well aware of the specific criticisms which can be held against them and spit them back in the face of any disagreement. Any dissent is straight away labelled as one of the usual phrases - ad-hominem - useful idiot - straw man argument and others. There is no debate, only offence. I suppose it gels with the ever-increasing drive towards facelessness in society - the fact that interaction is now almost all through technology - outwardly society in developed countries looks like a lot of electronics talking to itself with a few organic microbes floating around inside it. It smacks of a collective autism, the removal of social clues. The future is antisocial.

It Doesn't Feel Like the Future

In the spirit of all that "Where is my Robot?" guff, I was thinking about what it actually meant to be in 2010 - a full ten years beyond all those Blue-Peter boundaries when we discovered that the future of 2000 was not actually very different from the time when we all first thought about it. It is of course because, like the way people we know and meet everyday do not seem to age, we are blind to the slow changes. While we don't have hover cars and personal robots, we do have technology that would have seemed far-further-fetched had someone mentioned it in the 60s. The cars we do have, have computers to maximise fuel economy, radios which search for travel news, and all sorts of little bits and pieces to make them work better and feel better to the passengers. Most houses have access to digital information at rates of transfer that still cannot be comprehended. Just as the distances that separate stars are so far that we don't have the apparatus to think about them, the amount of information which squirts between all those little black boxes every day is outside our ability to reference it with real-world terms. Even if you shrink the time period down to bring the data volumes to a recognisable figure, the time taken is now just too small for your brain to handle.

The future is just the present having caught up with you.