1. We have at least one fusion plant I know of, the UK Joint Torus, which I know have been operating for decades. It just consumes more power than it generates. But Asimov suggests one or two, which is strikingly accurate.
2. We could probably make radio-decay batteries (maybe not AA size, but car batteries running on Thorium or some such, albeit an extremely expensive containment for something running so hot). We probably just don't do it because the radiation risks are too high.
And I'd count airport conveyors as moving sidewalks. Or just the complexity of baggage carrying systemes in those airports, lend that we easily have the technoloy to create weather resistant rotary motor systems as sidewalks, but like Asimovs suggestions of underground housing, cost is the bigger prohibitor than technology.
Also, I don't think the degree of boredom he touches on has occured. Consumerism and the wealth concentration in the US has kept people needing to maintain 40 hour work weeks where productivity is magnitudes higher. We produce vastly more, but work as much as ever. Back in the 60s the sentiment was that 21st century Americans might have 10 hour work weeks.
> We produce vastly more, but work as much as ever. Back in the 60s the sentiment was that 21st century Americans might have 10 hour work weeks.
Isn't that because we now have a very large semi-parasitical managerial class that we need to support? It's almost a retreat into feudalism. Doubt anybody saw that coming.
One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now.
Think of pointless meetings, smoke breaks, soda breaks, talking about sports, life, hobbies, debating/complaining, talking politics, talking about TV shows, online shopping, keeping up with twitter/FB/Linkedin, Hacker News, the average cubie dweller probably only puts in 10-20 hours a week of actual work right now.
"Everyone knows" the guy who's forced to put in 60 hours at the office who spends 50 of those hours on FB / Reddit / talking about football, etc.
There's a Russian proverb about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
If you define work as "hours spend on premises" then no one has worked as many hours as Americans do today since the early 1900s. If you define work as actually doing something productive, well, thats a whole nother ball game.
>One interesting interpretation is the ratio of people with desk jobs consisting of 50% (or higher) fooling around vs sweaty manual labor jobs has led to the average American perhaps only working 20 hours a week right now.
For actual work, maybe even less.
But not having pocession of your body for 8-12 hours every day in exchage for a pay-check, is work too. Even if you just sit there and "do nothing".
No, it's because if a worker works 8h/day, and produces X, given a new technology that double his productivity, he is now expected to still work 8h/day, and produce 2X.
And this, incidentally, is why there never will be "more jobs". Occupation is production over productivity. With an increment of productivity, you can ramp up production up to mass-production keeping the same occupation level. But markets get saturated, so you can't increase production indefinitely. Still, productivity, with automation and robotization and renewable energy sources, could be make practically infinite. But for the reason in the post above, work is not distributed in the work-force.
However, if the rise in average incomes in the US over the past thirty or forty years were more evenly distributed among the working population, and not just concentrated at the top, many people would probably choose to work much less.
People work to support themselves, but I would wager that most would work less to support themselves if they could earn enough to do so.
Can I assume you have neither spouse nor child? I'd argue that once those things come along you might disagree with your own statement. You could probably rephrase it so I agreed with you, though: "People don't work because they want to support their boss's high standard of living, they work because they want to improve their own."
I'm not sure what you think job creators are. Is it some kind of medal you get when you employ someone? Do you loose it if you fire them? What kind of conditions constitutes employing? Do I get to be a job creator if I give you a dollar for explaining your point?
Job providers, I get why those are important. Not everyone wants to be bothered with the business side of living, along with its risks. I can actually see how that division of labour and responsibilities aids both sides of the equation.
But if you count self-employment, there's job providers on every rung of the social ladder. The chinese guy selling chua'r on the street is a job provider, just as much as the multimillion entrepreneur employing thousands of people.
So it becomes senseless to say that one wealth bracket supplies jobs, and another one doesn't.
And then there's "job creation", which seems like a meaningless metric if you don't factor in loss of jobs, current amount of jobs, unemployment, etc. And you seriously want to pin that metric down on a single group?
By the way, if the take the logic further, and look at who's implicated in major job destruction (layoffs), it's us. Hackers. I'm going from the Systems optimization definition here, and when you optimize away a part of a system, someone's bound to get fired. Your packaging machine eliminated 5 packaging workers. Your fiber optic cable eliminated 50 post office workers.
I hate when the discussion devolves into putting flesh bodies into 40 hour a week boxes to repeat some repetitive task.
The truth behind job scarcity or not is supply and demand. Period. If there is no demand for yours, or someone elses labor, there is no job. No wealth redistribution will change that. The arguments behind why, though, the concentration of wealth was bad, is that the wealthy have fewer demands they want met relative to the entirety of everyone else. A more prosperous majority gnerates tremendous demand, millionaires generate limited and specific demand.
But you don't escape the reality of having a supply of something trying to meet the demand for it. There just isn't much demand for a lot of labor types, and producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.
I hate when the discussion devolves into putting flesh bodies into 40 hour a week boxes to repeat some repetitive task.
Me too. Apparently it's primarily a mass-media political posturing tool for the (fearing-to-be-)disenfranchised classes (ie. a huge proportion of the population).
producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.
... and loads of people shifted to the bottom of the opportunity barrel, save for states with some semblance of social welfare (ie. not the US).
That just requires a realization that few people can provide the necessary resources and goods to maintain the rest. We avoid that realization, hence elsewhere in this comment thread discussions of 50%+ office jobs and only working 10 hours of your 40 hour shift come into play. I guess it plays counter to the rugged individualism model of thinking (that, let us be honest, wealthy business owners love because it creates surplus labor supply on a cultural basis rather than a fiscal need) even though we have had 1% of the population working as farmers for 30 years providing all the crops we eat, even when our crops are grossly inefficient like beef.
Well, I don't think anyone should choose for 'the rest'.
With regards to your comment on 1% of people being farmers and that being adequate, here's some fast facts about the US agricultural industry:
(1) 300 million people in the US, and the US can sustainably produce food for only 130 million of them. (recentish UN estimate I believe)
(2) Many US farms are net energy consumers, ie. they burn more energy in production than they give people in food.
Second, the earth will actually produce enough to support many humans using no humans (ie. "let the plants grow back, stop maintaining the concrete, stop unsustainably exploiting and poisoning the environment"). It just requires us to be a bit more in tune with the environment (eg. decentralize, consume in-season, eat less meat, start sharing a bit more).
Like with the prescient Ladies' Home Journal predictions, much of what hasn't happened isn't so much that we couldn't do it, but that we can do it and find it uninteresting or inconvenient after all (like moon colonies: doable, just not much point given the cost involved vs benefits).
+1 to Willi there, moon colonies are not currently "doable". They will be once we have on-orbit re-fueling. That is because you have to have some way of transporting things you cannot get or make on the moon, too the moon.
The Apollo program, as impressive as it was, was never expected to be extendable to a colony effort. Rather first a space station was to be put in orbit, then on-orbit refueling, then space 'tugs', and then you could send up things that could land on the moon and ship additional building materials there.
That said, I found the hovercraft idea interesting since the benefit of hovercraft are completely negated by the inability to push against the surface for turning force and thus to re-capture forward energy into turning energy. This is a huge problem with lighter than air airships as well. Asimov should have known that.
It is irritating to hear claims that something can be done which has never been done. As evidenced by every project I've ever worked on, people have a very poor idea of how much work it takes to accomplish a task. There are very likely hurdles to building moon colonies that you have not considered.
There is a big difference between saying something is possible and saying something is easy. I don't think it is easy to build a moon colony. On the other hand, I do not see any scientific or engineering reason why it is not possible. We have already proven we can land on the moon and that we can build space colonies (i.e. ISS). Sure there are hurdles I have not considered, but that just makes it hard not impossible.
2. I bet we could figure it out. Again don't see any reason why it is not possible. Very little research has gone into that particular problem which I think is the main reason it has not been done.
It is irritating to hear claims that something can be done which has never been done.
Hardly irritating - that's my job, which I enjoy.
Sure, moon colonies would require enormous effort, staggering cost, and some new technology. The problem isn't the engineering challenge; we put people & equipment in a habitable box, and brought them back, using half-century-old technology. The problem is the cost far exceeds the payoff for anywhere close to the foreseeable future, and the scenery there is about as interesting as Death Valley (briefly compelling, but you wouldn't want to live there).
On 2, NASA does use radioactive decay batteries on the rovers, but it's still 'space tech' :)
> where productivity is magnitudes higher
Overall, yes. Per worker? Hell no. Half or more of current jobs are pushing paper and doing meaningless bureaucratic work. Related article from last week: www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Of note is chart 6, which shows GDP per hour worked has grown, albeit slowly, for most developed countries; and table 2a, which shows real GDP per employed person has more than doubled since 1960 for the US, and in some developed countries like Japan, increased 6-7x.
If you consider 'productivity' as generating financial wealth, yes, but GDP is not a material measure. Going solely by that, bankers would be the most productive workers on earth, and I'm sure lots of people would disagree.
There are several teams working on a dense plasma focus design for fusion rather than the large and expensive tokamak or laser designs. What I like about dense plasma focus is if it works, little or no neutrons (bad radiation), the apparatus is the size of a garage, extremely cheap for a power plant. As far as I am aware, these guys are the closest to achieving a fusion power plant with dense plasma focus: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
1. The National Ignition Facility [1] recently reported record amounts of energy produced by laser-based fusion, but it is more of a research facility than a power plant.
2. Do the betavoltaics [2] in some early pacemakers and the small reactor on spacecraft and the Mars Science Laboratory count as radioactive batteries? But I am assuming that, since betavoltaic pacemakers and nuclear spacecraft have been around since Asimov's time, they probably don't count.
The wikipedia page doesn't seem to have any information about "record amounts of energy produced" at NIF. The closest thing I've found is a press release[1] that mentions "highest [neutron] yield achieved so far from a layered DT implosion". Neutron production should be proportional to the number of fusion events (and thus also the energy released). But, its odd that they don't claim this specifically.
underground building will always be more expensive than the above ground equivalent. Some of the more interesting close to underground alternatives are still very costly in labour (earthships, straw bale), and not thoroughly tested in many climates. Engineered below ground construction will always cost a shit-tonne in concrete and waterproofing (source - just built an engineered 3.5 metre downstairs in a 2m cut on the side of a hill).
1. We have at least one fusion plant I know of, the UK Joint Torus, which I know have been operating for decades. It just consumes more power than it generates. But Asimov suggests one or two, which is strikingly accurate.
2. We could probably make radio-decay batteries (maybe not AA size, but car batteries running on Thorium or some such, albeit an extremely expensive containment for something running so hot). We probably just don't do it because the radiation risks are too high.
And I'd count airport conveyors as moving sidewalks. Or just the complexity of baggage carrying systemes in those airports, lend that we easily have the technoloy to create weather resistant rotary motor systems as sidewalks, but like Asimovs suggestions of underground housing, cost is the bigger prohibitor than technology.
Also, I don't think the degree of boredom he touches on has occured. Consumerism and the wealth concentration in the US has kept people needing to maintain 40 hour work weeks where productivity is magnitudes higher. We produce vastly more, but work as much as ever. Back in the 60s the sentiment was that 21st century Americans might have 10 hour work weeks.