You never know when something is going to set you off on a column. I didn't even have my notebook with me when I stopped by Le Peep this lunch hour to have my breakfast. The fellow next to me was in his late-40s, wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt from Sturgis. We started chatting about work and he told me he was an electrician.

"How much do you make an hour doing that?" I asked.

"In Champaign? Thirty-four dollars an hour."

Wow, I thought to myself, that's competitive.

"You know our biggest problem, though?" he continued. "Getting smart people to become apprentices. We can never fill all our positions. You know anyone?"

This got me to thinking. For a person of high intelligence, how would a career as an electrician pan out compared to say, getting a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois? I came home and ran some figures.

Here's my sources: For the Chemical Engineers, I used the Princeton Review . For the Electricians, I used the US Department of Labor statistics.

Taking the median values for earnings and the cost of tuition and fees only at the University of Illinois (I think I'm being fair here--it's reasonable to assume that day-to-day living expenses are covered by parents or job) I was able to make the following calculations:

Total earnings electrician age 22--$113,633

Total earnings minus education costs chem e age 22--minus $80,000

Total earnings electrician, age 27--$327,540

Total earnings minus education chem e, age 27--$206,800 (includes interest on student loans)

Total earnings electrician, age 34--$633,697

Total earnings chem e, age 34--$791,300

The break-even point for total income in an area with the median income for an electrician is age 30. Interestingly enough, for a high-demand location like Champaign-Urbana (with a $34/hour pay scale for electricians), the break-even point is age 45.

Still, this seems like a good deal for the Chemical Engineer until you examine other circumstances involving the jobs.

1) Amount of time at work.

The median workweek for an electrician is 37.5 hours. That of a chemical engineer is 45 hours. This reduces the per/hour salary differential by 17%.

2) Number of jobs available

There are 705,000 electricians employed in the United States and 50,000 chemical engineers. There is no projected increase in the number of chemical engineering jobs and a 5000 per/year increase in electricians employed over the next ten years.

Any pay differential must be multiplied by the probability of obtaining a job in your field. For an electrician, the probability is near 100% because of the apprentice program.

3) Investment Opportunities

One approach to long-term investing is to approach the market intelligently early and make as much money as you can while you're young. While the 22 year old chemical engineer is busy spending every cent he has on college expenses, the apprentice electrician has already made $114,000 in income. The median necessary monthly living expenses for a 22 year old single male in the US is just over $500. This means that after that four-year period, the apprentice electrician has $90,000 of disposable income available to him, if he so desires, to use for investments. If he uses that wisely, he might not have to work for a living after all.

4) Job Security

Since the number of total chemical engineering jobs in the US is stable, it is in the best interest of companies' profits to lay off expensive older engineers and hire the cheap ones coming out of college. There is a $45,000 difference in income between a new college graduate and an engineer who has been with a company for 12 years. This difference is a powerful incentive to get rid of the experienced engineers.

The case is the opposite with the electricians. With a 5000/year increase in number of jobs, it is in the best interest of the employers to keep experienced employees around to teach the new people the ropes. Since salary is capped (except for CoL raises) after the apprenticeship, there is no savings for the company in firing older employees until their medical costs become a problem.

In addition, most electricians are protected by their trade unions, which prevent arbitrary decisions about termination and negotiate salaries for a wide area. The employment price for an electrician is not set arbitrarily by the employer, but is the highest value that the local market can bear. With the need for such talents, a smart electrician can assess that market and move to where the highest wages are paid.

5) The Global Economy's Impact

Engineers of any sort work in software--they trade their problem-solving abilities for money. The problem with software work is that it is not localized. It is just as easy for a corporation to use an engineer in India or the Phillipines as it is for them to use one in the United States. Since education costs are lower in other countries, the engineers there will work for lower wages. It's similar to the situation with manufacturing jobs when NAFTA was instituted. Over the next two decades, the white-collar "brain" jobs will be outsourced more and more often.

Electricians, on the other hand, are hardware providers. You will not be able to have a foreign national run conduit in your business's basement from 12,000 miles away anytime soon. This can be said of any of the other trades--plumbing, heating, carpentry, painting or ironwork, too.

6) Opportunities for self-employment

An ambitious, intelligent electrician with an eye to the niche-market (for example, installing fire alarms) can move into his own business easily. The engineer, on the other hand, would have to return to college (or stay there long enough) to get an advanced degree and then move up in a partnership in a model just like that of a lawyer. He will never, in truth, be his own boss until he in his late 40s or early 50s at the earliest.

Truth be told, if I was a 2008 high-school graduate with my intelligence and what I know about the situation right now I would be at the union hall with a letter before the ink dried on my diploma. The fact is, the situation for chemical engineers is the BEST one for any of the engineering professions--all the others are less competitive economically. I figure that with the current economic situation and early investment in the market before marriage or a serious relationship, I would be able to retire from being an electrician by age 45 or so.

Something to think about.



Tom Trumpinski

Labels: education, future, Tet, trades, work

A hat-tip to Augur for pointing me to this site:

Watch me go to lunch at 11:30am.

Now, imagine millions of these scattered across the country, inside and out, recording 24/7, user pointed, multi-taskable, almost invisible and easily searchable by Google and you've got what 2016 is very likely to be like. Play with the zoom for a bit--I go to lunch in the big building with the clock tower in top center of the FoV.

Tom

Labels: future, Tet, webcams, Where's Waldo

For the economists and political scientists on the blog:

"What would be the effect on our economies and social structures if there were one billion millionaires in the earth's population in the year 2025?"

Assume that this is nuclear-family worth and that there is no significant inflation.

Tom

Labels: economics, future, public policy, Stretch, Tet

My lovely librarian-wife sent me this this morning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

I am not quite sure what to make of it. It seems possible to me that it may be an example of the kind of group-mind I am experiencing among my Freshmen this year. The Millenials that are coming in now are qualitatively different from any students that I have ever seen. I do not yet have words for it--I may write a piece on it later this year.

Tom

Labels: future, generations, questions, sociology, Tet

I think that Americans in the next decade are going to have an opportunity to witness something that hasn't happened since 1856--the death of a political party. A century hence, the history downloads are going to be speaking of the old GOP in parallel with the Whigs and noting that in both cases, their end occurred before extreme social upheavals.

A lot is made of the theory that the Democratic Party is made up of a coalition of disparate groups united mainly by their own enlightened self-interest and a dislike of their opponents. What many pundits continue to ignore, however, is that the Republican Party is equally fractionated, and the glue holding those groups together is dissolving.

Let's do a bit of a history lesson. For the first three-quarters of the 20th Century, the Republican Party was a minority party, even when they had a member in the Oval Office. The power that those of you who are younger than 35 are familiar with is a relatively recent event.

The party of Lincoln during the first half of that century was populated almost exclusively by northerners. The scars of Republican carpetbagging in the Deep South put a lock on the offices there for the opposition. Most of the GOP members were "owners" of one kind or another--they owned the steel mills, the prosperous farms, the businesses, and the banks. Their bastion of strength was the Northeast, where families like the Rockefellers and the Bushes fiercely protected their wealth.

Internationally, the party was isolationist, opposing not only the two world wars, but also adventurism in general. The big exception to this was the Communists of the Soviet Union. Since the power in the party was in the hands of capitalists, those who executed them whenever they got the chance were natural blood enemies.

Now, it's easy to explain why the Republicans were a minority during these years. There are always a lot more workers than plant owners. There's only enough prosperity, even in boom times, to support a few multi-billionaire families. Having to write off an entire section of a nation year after year is never a winning proposition.

Enter Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The economics that they espoused ran contrary to the vast majority of thinkers at the time in that it theorized that government was not the solution to problems in the marketplace, but the root cause of many of them. This stood in opposition to the interests of the eastern capitalists, since many of them were dependent on the Cold War buildup of the military-industrial complex that was making them richer every day. A new kind of Republican began to gain influence--the Libertarian. These outlaws expanded the economic theories of the "Big Three" above to social questions. In 1964, they managed to get Barry Goldwater nominated to oppose LBJ. He lost the main election by a landslide, relegating that group to the wings for a while. In many ways, this was not a bad thing, since it allowed visionaries like Karl Hess (who wrote Barry's speeches) to mature in their thinking.

We entered the mid-1970s with the two sides sparring, but not having much to fight over. The party was in disarray from the scandals of their last elected President, Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan, the governor of California during the hippy years, served as the torch-bearer for the libertarian wing and Nelson Rockefeller did the same for the eastern capitalists. Reagan mounted a respectible challenge for the 1976 nomination, but the monied interests kept the incument, Jerry Ford as their candidate.

During the years of the Carter administration, though, there was a sea change in the South. Even though the president was from their section of the country, many many voters there felt betrayed by the Democratic Party on social issues. The late 70s was a heyday of progressive thought, with social experimentation occuring in areas such as women's roles in the family, gay rights and affirmative action in education and employment. Sex was casual and often, especially among the young, since there were few impediments to it--diseases were easily cured by antibiotics and pregnancies were either avoided by birth control or ended with abortion.

There was a large segment of social conservatives, however, who felt that progressive thought had gone way too far. Many of these were evangelicals from the southern states and the west. When the Republicans nominated Reagan in 1980, they attracted both the social conservatives (who became known as "Reagan Democrats,") and the Libertarians. In exchange for one of the monied class, George H. W. Bush, becoming Vice-President, the eastern capitalists agreed to support the ticket.

For the first time since the stock market crash of 1929, the Republican Party had managed to put together a winning combo. The Congress was still in the hands of the opposing party, but the wide-ranging influences of the three groups would often provide synergies which would allow bills to pass through Capitol Hill that would have failed under Nixon or Ford.

In the late 1980s, because of the success of the coalition, especially in the foreign policies that were considered to be responsible for the ending of the Warsaw Pact, the GOP attracted a new group of ex-Marxists and student radicals. The Neo-conservatives saw in the collapse of Marxist states and Fukuyama's End of History an opportunity for the birth of a new opportunity for a Wilsonian expansion of democracy to the world.

They were all thrown a curve by a new, rising force in the early 1990s, however, Nativist Populism. An unknown and eccentric millionaire, Ross Perot, appealed to these new sentiments in the American people and managed to divert enough votes away from the Republican candidate to get Bill Clinton elected. However, two years later, the Republicans showed enough power to take control of Congress for the first time since Harry Truman. This control would last a full decade, almost to the present day.

Ok, so much for history. Now, let's discuss the present state of affairs and see how it is perceived by each of the four members of the GOP coalition:

Neo-conservatives--The Iraq War has not been as easy as they thought it was going to be. For the most part, the members of this group are not blaming flaws in their own Wilsonian theories, but on outside agencies like Iran. While the lesser candidates of the Democratic Party are loud in their criticism of the war, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, has already stated that she is opposed to an immediate pull-out from Iraq and a continued presence in the country. In addition, Clinton's husband showed a great deal of ambition on the world stage by promoting democracy in Yugoslavia along the lines of neo-con theories. It is rumored that neo-conservatives within the Bush administration are already briefing Hillary regarding the situation in the war zone in the belief that she will win.

Social conservatives--There are three major issues in play with this group. First and foremost, there's abortion. No matter what any pundits say, this group absolutely will not vote for someone who is even perceived as soft on this issue. They will stay home or vote for an available third party. The second issue is "family and tradition." While this is most strongly exhibited by the call for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, it also causes this group to look closely at the past history of a candidate to determine the liklihood of their supporting legislation in this direction. Scandal after scandal within the GOP's members in Congress has also eroded any confidence that the social conservatives might have had in there being a difference between the two parties. The third is immigration. Since most of the social conservatives and evangelicals are Reagan Democrats, they are concentrated in southern states and the West. These states are closer to the Mexican border and therefore have been exposed to a larger influx of illegal immigrants. The Republican party has not shown much ambition whatsoever in ending the wave by enforcement and has extended the olive branch to the new, potential citizens in the last few months.

Libertarians--To a libertarian, there is no signficant difference between the Republicans and Democrats at the moment except the issue of abortion. Neither party is particularly interested in reducing the size of government, lowering taxes for all Americans and reducing the amount of foreign involvement, especially where money is concerned. The GOP has been more intrusive on individual rights with the Patriot Act than any Democrat has ever dreamed of being. The only candidate of either party that looks attractive to a Libertarian is Ron Paul.

The Capitalist Class--These guys are going to go for whoever is going to do them the most good. They don't have large numbers, but they have a great deal of money. The best way to tell who they're backing is to look at the rate at which candidates are collecting campaign contributions. The Republican congressional campaign financing in the past year has been so unsuccessful that they laid off their phone solicitors, so the party is doing very poorly on the grassroots level. The power of each individual capitalist these days, however, is so great financially, that the race on this level could shift back and forth at a moment's notice. The capitalists, however, are consistenly in favor of free-trade and would like a new, low-salaried working class in the country.

The situation we see, therefore, is one in which the four parts of the Republican coalition no longer have a common interest and in some cases are in direct opposition. The Libertarians see no real reason to vote for any candidate of either party. The social conservatives simply will not vote for Giuliani and have questionable support for any candidate except Ron Paul. The Neo-cons like Giuliani for his support of the war, but are very nervous about his stability long-term. All of the candidates have spoken about protectionism and are in favor of reducing immigration so the capitalists are shaking in their boots.

So, I think that the candidate next year will probably be Rudy. What I expect to happen, then, is this--there's going to be a third party in the election, promoted by the social conservatives. It might nominate Paul, or its candidate could be someone else like Dobson or one of the other evangelical leaders. This will draw enough votes away from the mainstream of the Republican party to create an election landslide for the Democrats that will put a veto-proof majority in Congress.

The rancor afterwards will make the dislike of Nader in 2000 look like a love-fest. The social conservatives will have already left. The libertarians, encouraged by the support for Paul, will work to merge with the Buchananite nativists to bring about a reduced government state. The GOP will find itself with only the remnant of the Eastern capitalists that didn't go over to Hillary and the Neo-cons.

...And then we lose the war in Iraq. The Neo-cons are eliminated--laughed out of town riding a rail. The end of history has not only not occurred, but we're stuck in the middle of a rather unpleasant chapter. What's left of the party is exactly where it was in 1960--a minority, dreaming of its halcyon days.

The funny thing about all this? Ron Paul, if the party got behind him, could draw in all of the voters of the party except for the Neo-cons. He's not going to come close this election, but watch closely. If he even gets close to putting up a floor fight, the neo-cons are going to sharpen their pitchforks. He is the only candidate with even a minor chance of beating Hillary in 2008 for all of the reasons that I have explained above.

And one, final note: Here's the best example of why Rudy will never win the Presidency of the United States and a salute to New York City in general, courtesty of The Onion (hat-tip to Vox.)

A Challenge for Al-Qaeda!

Tom

Labels: future, libertarianism, politics, Tet

Explorer scouts from the Homer, SoCha, troop 314 have found the first evidence of sentient extraterrestrial life during their virtrip to Asteroid 253 Mathilde. The remote sensing device that the troop had created found an entrance which had been covered by a thin layer of dust for geologic ages. Mathilde had been flown by last century, and at that time had been found to have an average density lower than that of water. No scientists of that period, however, could have guessed that it was a hollow artifact. Marc Hoover, scoutmaster, stated that when their bot entered the craft, they found what seemed to have been a control room, although all the equipment had been removed. A plaque was mounted on the wall of the interior and was holoscribed and turned over to the University of Illinois for decryption. Brigette Okuma, linguist, said that the plaque, "is similar to the ones that were included by humanity on the Pioneer and Voyager probes during the 20th Century." Made to be easily understood, the plaque contained the symbols for both DNA and a map of the earth with a supercontinent. Paleontologists confirmed that the map approximately corresponds to the Edicarian Period, a time when all of the planet's original phyla appeared.

The first created Martians leave for the Red Planet early next spring. Baby Boomers have been offered regeneration to a bioage of 25 in exchange for two years supervisory work on the Martian colonization project. There have been no shortage of volunteers. Eris Morgan, head of the Austin-Center based company managing the operation said that, "Humanity no longer will have all of its eggs in one basket."

Edward Jenkins was arrested by NorthAthens officials as he attempted to send a package containing a tailored retrovirus into the center of Southeastern Europe. Angered by the refusal of authorities there to refund the charges on his Age of Pericles virvacation, he has allegedly created a nan which would render anyone with one or more Greek ancestors sterile. His trial is planned for next month.

KansasCityCenter city council voted to increase the tax on stim within their borders to help pay for the power-downlink infrastructure. This 128-block area at present is the largest remaining governmental body in North America. There have been no comments from the citizenry yet, but the last tax increase was followed by calls for secession.

The reforestation of the Ohio Valley has been completed. The head of the Cherokee Tribal Council announced that any humans with provable Cherokee mitochondrial DNA will be afforded citizenship in the lowtech reserve. "About damn time," Ben Whitebuck said, looking over the new growth from a bluff overlooking the River. "The place was a lot better before those crazy bastards showed up from Europe."

The Fujita family of Okinawa has offered their latest creation to the 'Sphere for the cost of manufacture. This new nanobot is designed to remove the ability to perceive differences in race from the brains of infected humans and uplifted animals. "We've gotten so much from others since the tsunami, the least we could do is end racism forever."

The Wrigleyville Cubs failed in their drive for the playoffs when they dropped a critical game 36-34 to the Riverfront Cardinals. The hapless team has not won a World Series since 1908. "Wait til next year," Eddie Bukoski of Lakeview said. "I'm sure we'll have the pitching worked out by then--lots of new blood."

[[Data review ended]]

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[[Life support terminated]]

[[End program]]

[[...]]

"Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Pile on many more layers and I'll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And we'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph,
sail on the steel breeze.
Come on you boy child, you winner and loser,
come on you miner for truth and delusion,
and shine...."

Labels: future, My Past Through Tomorrow, science-fiction, Tet

Late last evening, Augur challenged me to be more specific in my futurist predictions. He stated that while it was interesting to read about vague references to the changes that are in store for America and the rest of the human race, it might be useful if I could put all of my speculations in one, easy to reference document.

I spent very little time sleeping last night. By morning, I had managed to mentally outline a set of six blog posts which would feature news stories from the next forty years. I plan on printing them, one per day, beginning tomorrow. I'll finish up with a post a week from tomorrow summarizing the exercise and answering any questions that you might have raised that were not sufficiently covered in the discussion.

Some caveats, though:

First of all, I don't know what the future is going to bring, really. What I am going to be positing is the most likely, in my mind, path that humanity is going to take. As was demonstrated in 2001, a couple dozen determined individuals are more than capable of changing the course of history on a world-wide scale. As technology gives individuals more and more power, the groups of world-shakers will become smaller, not larger. Therefore, as time progresses, the specifics of my educated guesses will probably diverge further and further from reality.

Even trained science-fiction writers and technical experts are dismal at predictions. Only Heinlein, that I know of, successfully predicted the sudden fall of the Soviet Union. Tom Clancy was the only person in techno-thriller fiction that proposed the use of airliners as weapons of mass destruction. Very few of the prognosticators of the 1960s came within a block of understanding that computing would be distributed in the 21st century, not locked into huge mainframes.

Therefore, I would consider myself a genius if I managed to be more than about 75% correct on these predictions. I've thought about each of them at length, examining the root causes, as well as the effects that they will have on the lives of individuals and the chain of events that will result from them.

The future will look a lot like the past with a few things changed in major ways. As the rate of technological change accelerates, that future will become less and less comprehensible to those of us living today. Many of you reading these posts will live the forty years necessary to see the predictions succeed or fail. Like me, you'll find yourself on a journey from a lost world (like the one I describe in my Tonica Days stories) to one in which every day presents new wonders, for good or for ill.

So, beginning tomorrow, we'll take a walk on the wild side. Any of you who are budding science-fiction writers are welcome to take any idea that I present here and run with it. If you do so, please include a note of credit for the germ of your story in the introduction, that's all I ask--my ego will supply the rest of what I need from that. I reserve the personal right, of course, to do the same, although fiction-writing is not in my current plans.

The posts will be in the form of short news stories, similar to those that one can currently find on CNN.com or The Drudge Report. We'll start slow and familiar with a couple of six month intervals, then proceed to five years, then a decade or so before ending in 2047. All commentary is welcome in the comments section (except for screechy monkey poo, of course.)

Ready to go? Let's fasten our seat belts, folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride....

Tom

Labels: future, My Past Through Tomorrow, science and technology, science-fiction, Tet

I've been pondering sex the last couple of days. I do know that there are those of you in the audience, of course, that are saying right now, "A couple days? I thought it was your way of life?"

Be that as it may, let me get a show of hands: "Is there anyone out there who still isn't convinced that without the influx of money from porn, they wouldn't be reading this on the web right now?"

Oh, you--the guy in the white shirt in the back row who came here to read about polygamy. Tell you what, I've got this lovely '65 Les Paul guitar for you for only $3000. If you don't want that, I've got a unicorn hair for only $2000--make you live forever, it will.

Let's talk about masturbation, "hooking up" virtually and all kinds of wonderful non-procreative sex for a while. We're in the middle of a technological and societal revolution, and before we know it, it's going to change the way that men and women relate to each other forever.

What started me on this particular round of pondering was this article from C/Net News about a new virtual sex device for men that uses a computer and DVD with an additional track to run the machine. While viewers have been using computers to provide themselves with textual and visual stimulation at least since the start of USENET, (which last time I checked still had 464 different newsgroups in the alt.sex.* category,) this is the first time that I have seen a commercial device set up to provide a true "cybersex" experience for men. I find it fascinating that this is a traditional garage start-up tech company.

The Sinulator, for women is a few years older, and has an interface for the sending end that looks a lot like a racing control for a Playstation 3. It has a small but fervent following in the Webcam community. The revolution for women, on the other hand, is not only in technology, but in distribution and acquistion, as well. I'll get to that in a little bit.

At the moment, there is a legal battle going on over in Second Life over the theft of some software that allows the avatars of the virtual space to, well, "do it." It is possible that this theft could cost the designer thousands of dollars in business if the pirated software was distributed widely.

So, in my pondering, I've ended up with some questions that I'd like to put out to the readership for discussion:

How is the popularity and easy availability of sex toys for women changing how they relate to each other and to men?

Pure Romance is a $60 million business based in Ohio that has, with its 15,000 consultants nationwide, changed the way in which women buy and use sex toys. Operated similarly to Tupperware parties, the consultants bring demo models of the latest developments in stimulating devices to the homes of customers for all-women parties. While the sale of sex toys is still illegal in a number of states (Texas and Alabama being the most-often mentioned cases,) the parties have spread in popularity among groups of women ranging from the Hollywood A-List to the girls in the trailer-park behind the diner in small-town America.

The consultants don't just provide toys, lotions and scents, though. They also provide a pro-sex attitude that some of the women at the parties have never experienced before. Women in their sixties have been able to ask questions that have been puzzling them for decades about their sexuality. Young women, just out of their teens, are finding out that they're not the first generation to discover sex and that their grandmothers have done things that would give them the gosh-willies.

The kind of gender power-structure that has been present in America since the first sexual revolution of the 20th Century in the 1920s has been that women have power because they possess the sex for which men are willing to provide material goods and security in exchange. Only in the 1960s, when female-controlled contraception appeared, were the stakes lowered enough for women to begin to truly examine the necessity for their pleasure as well.

This new, empowering distribution of the means of pleasure now uncouples men from the process completely. There are many, many customers of Pure Romance who are married. In many cases, their husbands are consulted during the ordering process, so they are certain to get something out of the whole process. However, the emphasis is on maximizing the pleasure for the women involved and that decision rests solely in the hands of those women.

Will superior cybersex for men lower the amount of power women hold over men?

There is, of course, the other side of the coin. Men, in many cases, tolerate behavior from women that would get another man slugged at worst or shunned at best simply because they are desperate for the sex that the women could possibly provide. In the worst possible cases, men (particularly naive ones) actually marry completely incompatible women simply because of that sex. Often these women are discarded for a younger model when their beauty and sex-appeal begin to fade and the man has become successful enough to extend the age range of his attractiveness.

Right now, however, there's a competitor for that younger woman. There are a growing number of men who are being termed "porn addicts," since they are seen as neglecting their wives, who are pining away in the bedroom, for the glowing screen in the den and no-strings sex with a webcam girl or downloaded movie.

I don't think it's an addiction, whatsoever. What it is is a case where the sex with the machine is superior to the sex in the bedroom for the man. This kind of "addiction" seems to be very prevalent in those parts of our culture where men have been coerced into marriage in order to get sex in the first place--fundamentalists have been shown to be so prone that some churches are taking part in the "elephant in the pew" movement this month to combat this "perversion." It can best be summed up by the phrase, "the fucking he's getting is not worth the fucking he's getting."

What I feel will take place, as virtual sex gets better and better, is that women and men will be forced into a situation where they will have to negotiate their relationships, for the first time in human history, without the dichotomy of power that has existed up to now. It is possible that when couples (or more, can't forget us poly people) get together in the future, it will be more likely that it will be out of mutual respect and love, rather than fleeting sexual desire.

Is cyberphilia an indication of a new gender?

As the available technology of virtual sex advances, there are going to be those individuals who consistently prefer the stimulation of the cyber-world over that of the squishy, smelly, troublesome real world. We will need to move beyond thinking of these individuals as obsessed, addicted (keeping in mind that the Victorian concept of hysteria is that of a woman who had the ability to become sexually stimulated) or lacking the ability to interact with other human beings.

Instead, we can think of a new gender that is primarily attracted to machines--a technosexual, so to speak. It is interesting to think of the potential intersection of this new gender with the growing number of individuals who would be, at the same time, adopting wearable or permanent hardware. Would it be possible that the most attractive thing about the young woman at the bar would be the 24/7 earpiece that she is wearing or the under-the-skin computer processor that was surgically implanted? What would sex be like between two individuals with VR glasses and stim suits that do not touch at all, but still hump like rabbits two or three times per day?

What's the next step beyond these?

This new change is the third big change in sexuality that I've seen in my lifetime. I was born into the artificially repressed world of the 1950s, with the unnatural nuclear families born of the suburbs and superhighways. When the Pill, feminism and gay rights arrived in the 1960s, I watched a hedonistic society spiral to a point where having sex was approximately equivalent to playing tennis--good exercise after which you took a shower. The Plague Years in the early 1980s put an end to that, with many of us in the more avant-garde circles losing up to ten percent of our friends.

Now, we're on a platform powered by the cheap availablity of both cyber and bio-tech. Will people be able to choose new genders at will in a generation? Will they be able to switch back the next night? What about folks like Furries with an orientation that's biologically possible to create, but completely out of the ordinary? And the biggest question of all...

What would a society be like in which everyone had as much sex as they wanted and needed every day?

Tom

Disclaimer: One of my wives currently sells Pure Romance products and I have written for their consultants' magazine. While I do enjoy the products that she sells, this article in no way is an advertisement or endorsement of her business.

Labels: future, science and technology, sex, Tet

Since I have written the first two articles in this series, a number of readers have asked me what I think is going to happen to the poor, the disenfranchised and the unwanted in the vastly-changed future that I've been talking about.

I was heading into Borders bookstore Friday night when I spotted a copy of Tim LaHaye's and Jerry Jenkins' The Remnant. It occurred to me that a disturbingly high number of us in the futurist community that are speaking of the Singularity right now sound like pretribulation dispensationalists, believing that the intellectually virtuous will be saved while the rest of the world suffers through the tribulation of the end times.

Humanity is, indeed, heading at a breakneck speed toward an inflection point. Since the invention of agriculture, which allowed storage of food, and iron, which made metropoli possible, it has worked its way up the food chain to become a superpredator. There is no creature on this planet capable of giving it a run for its money. Ultimately, the next twenty or thirty years is going to answer the question of where it will end up in the Universe's grand scheme of things.

So, to answer the readers' question: I don't expect that the great, unwashed masses are going to do a whole lot one way or the other in this period. However, there's a couple of points that need to be made in this regard, lest I bring the wrath of heaven (or at least the idealistic) down upon me:

Society sets the stage, "great people" are the actors.

There is always debate within the historical community as to whether or not "the man makes the times" or "the times makes the man." I am of the opinion that neither is the case, that there have been, throughout history, both polymaths with the range of knowledge that the world needs and visionaries with the understanding of the methods of applying that knowledge. When you get someone like Jefferson (who we discussed yesterday) who is both, you have an individual who significantly alters the future of humanity.

While we can certainly have visionaries within the "outsider" groups of humanity, it is much more difficult to create polymaths there because of the inaccessibility of knowledge within those groups due either to lack of time to pursue it, cultural opposition to obtaining it or lifespans too short to fully utilize the knowledge obtained.

This is not due necessarily to any intrinsic flaw in those groups--often they are oppressed by power structures beyond their control and enslaved by those who wish to use their bodies and minds for their own profit. Nonetheless, with the exception of those few furtive individuals who have the drive for self-education, the world-shaking will not come from that quarter.

Big social and technological changes have come at times when there have been enough of a surplus of goods to allow a class with time over and above mere survival and access to enough information to self-educate. This maximizes the probability that a "great person" will arise through synergy.

Part of the reason that the Singularity is going to have such a big impact is that for the first time in history, we have enough dissemination of information combined with wealthy (historically speaking) individuals, that it is possible that all of the "great people" within a quarter of the earth's population could be simultaneously empowered at once.

One Jefferson created our present government. One Newton created our science.

What is going to happen when we have a million of them all working at once?

A virtuous "great person" can save a multitude.

"Well", you say, "looks like it's really going to suck to be a postman or a taxi driver."

Humanity has always had the disenfranchised and the poor. (After all, the disciples complained to Jesus that he wasn't doing enough to help them.) However, for the first time, we now have the capability of making large-scale changes which will aid them powered by the efforts of a single person.

Too idealistic, perhaps?

Absolutely not. Let me give you an example of one person who saved the lives of one billion people and ended hunger for a billion more (and with late 20th Century technology):

Norman Borlaug

There is some controversy over the methods that he employed. However, it is inarguable that in 1960, 60% of the population of the planet suffered from hunger at some time during the course of a year. By 2000, that percentage had dropped to 14%, despite a doubling of the Earth's population. Anyone who has suffered from the pangs of hunger for more than a couple weeks of their lives knows that they will do anything to avoid this happening again. This great man ended this problem for most of the world.

So, there's my answer.--While it is unlikely that a great number of the changes that are going to happen are going to be due to the efforts of the "outsiders," it is quite possible that some of the changes, particularly the ones created by idealist polymaths, could usher in a better life for all of them. It is up to all of us to provide that idealism.

Tom

Labels: future, philosophy, science and technology, Tet

So, Tom, what DID you learn from Robert A. Heinlein?

1) Competence

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." --Time Enough for Love, RAH, 1973

I was twenty-one years old when I first read those words. I had found that college was boring and that, with the draft ended, I would actually have a chance to drop out without fear of being the last poor sonuvabitch to die in Vietnam.

Read the words closely. Within this single paragraph is the essence of what a human should be able to do during a workday. Like nearly everyone else, there are a couple of the jobs mentioned that I have never been able to master. Pitching manure was the job at which I was so facile that I fled the farm before I was eighteen to avoid further instruction. I have known a very few people who have come close to mastering them all.

Velma (a redhead right off of a 1940s Heinlein cover) asked me at dinner last night how to find sane people to marry. At the time, I cobbled together an answer that spoke about devising practical methods within a city to contact and identify like-minded individuals. Sitting here in the ManCave now, I realize that there was a much better question to ask:

"How do I find competent people to marry?" In a family, you can put up with a lot more insanity or eccentricity than you can incompetence.

Velma, if you want a marriage to work, look for a family who can do ten or more of the things listed above. If you want a life in which every day is an adventure, look for one where they can do fifteen. If you ever, ever find someone who can do all twenty-one, call me immediately, we can always find a new house.

2) Freedom

Now of course, it's obvious that I'm a libertarian. I talk about it in nearly every post that I do on this blog. That ideal kind of personal freedom and responsibility is in every one of Heinlein's books and stories.

However, I think that now, for the human race to survive the next fifty years, we're going to be needing a new kind of freedom--the freedom for the prison of old paradigms.

Jason, another redhead, (they were coming out of the woodwork everywhere last night--I was looking over my shoulder for Gay Deceiver from Number of the Beast) was describing an experimental community in San Francisco in which he had lived for six weeks or so.

This community was interested in the question, "What would happen if decisions were made using strictly intuition, not logic?" The methodology, which could be questioned, involved limiting decision-making within the community of fifty to strictly the female members with the stipulation that no explanation ever need be given for their decisions.

"So," I asked, "how often were the decisions the right ones?"

"Well, about half of them were right, " Jason replied in his slow, West Texas drawl, "but the thing was, a hundred percent of them were DIFFERENT."

A lot of the problems that are causing the world grief at the moment are very, very old ones. Perhaps the reason that they're still here is that we've not yet found the methodology to work the solutions. We need the freedom to think differently in order to find that methodology.

3) Paying It Forward

Robert Heinlein had an extremely rare blood type. Had it not been for the generosity of a half-dozen strangers, he would have died about twenty years before his time. The rest of his life, he led, participated in and otherwise shilled for blood drives. At the convention this weekend, over 12% of the attendees gave blood--five times the national average.

During the course of my lifetime, I have had a set of mentors that have shown me different ways of proceeding. My father taught me the virtue of proceeding against any odds when the cause was just. From my Uncle Harry, I obtained a love of the eccentric, knowing that it was all right to be different as long as you were good at it.

I learned from Steve Errede, physicist extraordinaire, that genius was useless unless it was directed, but when it was, it was a force that could define the universe itself.

And lastly, from my husband, Sean, I learned that sometimes you could communicate better with silence and affection than you could with all of the words in Bartlett's.

Over the past twenty-five years, I've seen it as my duty to apprentice young people that I have encountered in the course of my life. I'm going to have a party at the end of my tenure at the university and invite them to my house so they'll, for once, get to meet each other and find out that the stories are all true, despite their doubts.

They've gone on to successful careers. With any luck at all, they left my tutelage possessing the freedom of thought that I described above, and using that, will be able to make a mark on the world, perhaps diverting it from its course toward perdition.

One of them writes here on a regular basis.--Augur, I am proud of you every day. You've exceeded my expectations so far, and I have no doubt that you'll far outshine me someday. I am overjoyed that you're reading the Heinlein book that helped to define my spirituality. As a matter of fact, you might find me in it (at least in my dreams.) The old fellow's introduced as he's sitting alongside his pool dictating a story to his secretary. I'm sure you'll recognize the person that I've always wanted to be.--Let me know how I've done, all right?

4) Optimism

Saturday night, I listened as Peter Diamandis told us that his business plan would, if it worked, result in his people on the Moon, having been there three years, waving to NASA when they finally arrived.

We're at probably the most critical point in the history of the human race since the glaciers receded and large-scale agriculture became possible. Moore's Law, the doubling of computing power every eighteen months, leads us to the conclusion that without slowing (and that is very unlikely, since the intervals between doublings is decreasing) a one-thousand dollar laptop in 2027 will have the number of computations per second of a human brain.

This vast increase in the speed of computation, combined with an unlocking of the human genome and nanotechnology, (all of which were discussed at the conference this weekend) will give individuals in only twenty years access to power that currently is held by small nations.

The problem will then not be that Kim Jong-Il has access to the ability to build weapons of mass destruction, but that Joe Six-Pack does. Since September 11, I've been watching humanity riding in a racing car heading for a cliff without any visible way out. I had, for all practical purposes despaired of our making it as a race.

I don't feel that way any more. I had folks sitting down seriously and discussing my theories of family dynamics and brainstorming ways to extend them to differing forms of human relationships. (I was also asked for an autograph out in the hallway by people I didn't know, which downright freaked me out.)

There was a slide up on the screen Saturday night describing the amount of platinum in a nickel-iron asteroid and jokes were told about buying precious metal futures to finance the trip.

A young woman who had had the kind of childhood that no person should ever have to live through showed me that despite that, she had faith that human beings were good and loving and that we were going to make it through this time and the children of men would play among the stars.

We're going to make it, folks. We're going to make it. These things I believe with all my heart.

Tom

Final Note:

I want to thank everyone that talked to us at the conference and everyone who made it possible. I wish that I had had time to see everyone there. I also wanted to include a special thanks to:

John Barnstead--your quiet contribution to The Stardance Project, I believe, has been essential to it making it this far. It's going to happen, and the world will hold its collective breath.

Mike Taht--I meant it when I said that your project was beautiful. Yours is the kind of effort that illustrates my point about different, innovative approaches making a brighter future.

Dick and Ann--providing a little taste of home when it was needed most.

Jay and Alan--great friends, companions and the masters of table talk. Jay took what was possibly the worst photo of me ever.

Charlie, mad scientist extraordinaire--just the right amount of perspective and a man who has the same problem with mist at certain times.

Jason, Alexa and Velma--you've restored my belief that good can come from the Bay Area. Sometimes that is hard to grasp from out here in the Midwest.

Colin--your city could rise again, like Venus from the foam. You can be a prime mover in what it becomes.

And Kate, words once again fail me. Thanks.

Come to kittencon, all of you, if you can.

Labels: future, Heinlein Centennial, Tet

Information Wasn't Always Cheap

I've left kitten in the Heinlein Centennial nerve center and returned to the finest hotel room I've ever had anywhere. We met the rest of the folks she had been working with for the past two years last night and most of the guests will be flying in sometime today. Writing is a bit slow, since I've got kitten's laptop and tmobile connection rather than one of my infernal machines from home. Hopefully, the third cup of Starbucks for the morning will make up for that.

I realize that I am at a bit of a disadvantage, since some of my audience here is what has been termed post-literate. I do not use this term derisively, but more as a factual description. I do not even see this as much of a problem, since this part of the continent was explored, settled and ruled for three hundred years or so by people who had a dozen books or fewer in their possession. The library currently in my house is actually larger than the one in my home town of 750 when I was a boy.

However, when I am speaking of the importance of an author in the creation of the culture in which you are now living, it is a problem if the audience has not read his works. Any of you who can use Google and Wikipedia can find out in a fraction of a second who Robert Heinlein was. My job for the rest of the week is to explain why he was important.

Information was not always cheap. Prior to 1980 and the advent of cheap cable television and the BBS precursors to the civilian internet, the only way that one could get information quickly was to pay for it--over the newsstand counter from a cigarette-smoking guy named Joe.

The mundane views of the world were contained in magazines like Time, Life, and for the hipsters, Rolling Stone. There were three television networks with a maximum of a half-hour of news per day, plus the government-supported PBS with educational content. If you wanted to know what happened yesterday, you dropped a quarter for today's newspaper.

For a farm boy hungry for excitement and a hyperactive imagination, this was stifling. Once a month or so, Cofoid's Drug Store would get in a new shipment of books which might contain one item of interest. In the Summer of 1964, this was a paperback book of short stories called The Green Hills of Earth. These had been written up to twenty-five years before, but the world progressed more slowly then, and they were still talking about a future that hadn't happened yet. Brave men and brilliant, beautiful women solved problems and survived in places that tested them on a daily basis. A lot of them were from small towns like mine. They dared to dream, and now I could, too.

By the time I hit High School, I could go to the grocery stores in the nearby towns and search their bookshelves for new science-fiction. Every once in a while, they'd have a new Heinlein--Stranger in a Strange Land (not Haight-Ashbury or Woodstock) turned me into a hippy, but I retained a trust in science and free-thought that my peers lacked. By the time I hit college, Time Enough for Love hit the shelves and, I now realize, shaped my life until, ultimately, (as kitten reminded me on Monday) I became a Heinlein character.

Now there's a big responsibility.

Who's in Kansas City this weekend?

1) The Literary Bunch--Heinlein is one of the three people who, more or less, invented modern science-fiction. (The other two being Asimov and Clarke.) The oldest living authors and science-fiction fans are of one generation younger than Heinlein and learned at his feet, so to speak. They'll be here talking about his influence on their works.

2) The Old Scientists' Club--Virtually every engineer and scientist over the age of 45 got into the business because they read Heinlein as a kid. I cannot emphasize this enough. The guys who saved Apollo 13 were using techniques of problem solving that they learned from his space adventures. When man first stepped on the Moon, Walter Cronkite had the entire world from which to choose to interview on his news broadcast about the meaning of space travel and the future--he picked Robert Heinlein.

I really liked the questions you sent me concerning wearable computers and the future of education, Augur, and I hope to run into someone who can shed some light on the subjects. The third question was the hoot, though, because one of my buddies from Fermilab who will be speaking at the conference will be talking about the history of the Bell Rocket Belt. If he still has his mockup, I'll see if I can get a picture of him wearing it.

In any case, if anyone is going to make space travel commercially viable in the next generation, the odds are that they will be sitting within a table or two of me at the banquet. I hope to get the choice seats because of my design work on the Top Quark project, which still counts for a bit in the scientific community. (kitten being on the planning committee for the conference for two years should actually make more of a difference.)

3) The political and sociological people--If there had not been a Robert Heinlein, there would never have been a Libertarian Party in America. When they created the Party in the late-60s and early-70s, Karl Hess and the boys were reading from Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Take Back Your Government. Military thinkers and strategists pondered the questions raised in Starship Troopers about the role of military service and how it relates to being a good citizen. Hippies, who read it the same time that I did, created entire communes based on the religion that he invented in Stranger in a Strange Land--the book that Augur's dad gave to him.

Heinlein had predicted the sexual revolution in an unpublished book in around 1939. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was writing of strong female characters who were the equals (or superiors) to the men around them. There's an entire lecture track here concerning line-families, free love and mutable gender-roles in Heinlein's works--and he had already described all of this stuff before 1965 .

So, there's going to be lots of material from which to choose. I'll try to come up with stuff you want to read. Please comment on things you want me to pursue and I'll do my best to comply.

Talk to you later.

Tom

Labels: future, Heinlein Centennial, science-fiction, Tet

Kitten and I are getting ready to pack for the Heinlein Centennial in Kansas City this coming weekend, so my commentary on others' posts for the next week will be scattered, if any.

Anyone who has any questions for the conference attendees should email them to me at tcgtrf@gmail.com and I will try to answer them as I log in, God and ATT willing.

I plan to write some articles and/or do some interviews while I'm there to post under the title Dispatches from Yesterday's Future. kitten's going to be speaking on a lot of panels on alternative relationships, line marriage and sexual polyamory in Heinlein's works.

I'll probably be hanging with the rocket scientists and the libertarians. Oh yeah, and the libertarian rocket scientists with beautiful daughters who want to marry me.....

See ya later.

Tom

Labels: future, Heinlein, libertarianism, Tet

Below is the first of what I hope will be many posts by a dear friend of mine. She is a terribly bright, fierce fifteen-year old. Dear readers, I give you Anna.

Because for under-age non-citizens, pining for the voting booth is less interesting than standing on a soapbox…
~by Anna

There's a special sort of phenomenon I've observed among people who consider themselves intelligent, or at least more intelligent than most of those immediately surrounding them. It manifests itself as a deliberate repulsion to anything perceived as popular or mainstream, be it cultural icons, media, or public figures. The theory is that the great unwashed are crude and often stupid, so their judgment can't be trusted. So when buzz builds, about, say, a young, Kenyan-Kansan, Illinois politician who happens to stir a great deal of emotion in the general public, the knee jerk reaction is to search, desperately, for reasons to shoot him out of the sky. I'm not ever going to advocate 'vox populi, vox dei'. There are many good reasons to question ‘accepted’ opinion. However, rejecting Barack Obama based on the public response he has received is as ridiculously wrong as embracing him because of the public response he has received.

I’m not advocating impartially; I've picked my candidate for President. I support Barack Obama because he is more a leader than a politician. He is both, but he's also unafraid to be the smartest person in the room and use three syllable words with whomever he’s talking to. He also understands how to pronounce those three syllable words and use them in context (“nu-cle-ar”, anyone?). He doesn't simplify issues for a target audience and doesn't reduce answers to slogans. And, wonder upon wonders, he can admit that some questions don't have any good or easy answers. The lack of condescension is so unique in our current climate.

Some have said (others have repeated shrilly) that he shies away from issues, but he has political courage enough to step outside the comfort zone of the well-worn mold of the traditional Democratic base. Obama's unique spot has enabled him to make broader appeals, at the expense of making fellow Democrats uncomfortable. From a Time Magazine article last week, "The Candor Candidate":

"…When a teacher asked him about the No Child Left Behind law that is so unpopular with educators and their unions, Obama agreed that it "left the money behind." But while he endorsed higher pay for teachers, Obama also talked about "the things that were good about No Child Left Behind," including more accountability. By then, his listeners were shifting in their chairs.

Regarding Social Security, the social program enshrined like no other in the theology of the Democratic base, Obama has said he is open to such politically heretical ideas as upping the retirement age and raising payroll taxes to shore up the system. Before black audiences, Obama regularly condemns violent and misogynist rap lyrics and chastises African Americans for disenfranchising themselves by not voting…"

He consistently pushes the boundaries of what is politically correct for a Democratic primary candidate, because he doesn't live in the black and white, with us or against us world of all the interest groups under the Democratic tent. He recognizes the place of pragmatism in politics, and won't choose dogma over progress, even if the packaging is imperfect.

Of course, it's very easy to seize upon the eloquence, charisma, and candor that he has become known for, but then he's castigated as all talk and no substance. Well, he has sponsored 54 pieces of legislation this year—among major candidates serving in the Senate, he is second only to Hillary Clinton, who has the benefit of seniority. Brownback has 16, Biden, 41; Dodd, 47; McCain, 25. Obama has introduced bills to help out urban school districts, repeal tax breaks for the oil and gas industries, improve benefits for service members, including homeless vets, promote alternate fuels, extend funding for genomics, and de-escalate the war (even before the Iraq surge, I might add), among others. He deals with the issues.

Mostly, though, I love Barack because of his rhetoric. He makes appeals beyond what is necessary to win an election- he wants to win the hearts of all of the electorate. There are many parameters on which we base our judgments of candidates, but at the core, running for the presidency, they just have to be able to lead. Obama moves people en masse. You don't have to make excuses for him. I'm sick of making the argument that Hillary isn't as abrasive or divisive as she seems. I'm sick of claiming Edwards isn't as fake as he seems. I'm sick of beginning sentences with, "What Biden was trying to say was…" I'm sick of settling for less.

Obama sets broad, some would say unrealistic, goals; it's true. But I think that ambition is good. I think that idealism is good. I don’t think we can rely on individuals alone to be a force of change. We’ve got a lot of things in this country that could and should be different than they are. We need leaders who see our admittedly overwhelming opportunity for improvement in so many areas as hopeful. Leaders who can seize on the great potential America has. Liberalism, disassociated from parties and appended positions, at its heart is the belief that we’re not done evolving and improving. Obama’s campaign embodies that belief. It’s the strength of that conviction that forms the basis of his appeal for the disillusioned. So, despite being a teenager, and characteristically committed to rebellion, I'm taking a dangerously popular position behind Barack Obama.

Labels: 2008, Anna, future, politics

Vox Day mentioned in his blog today this amazing speech by Charles Stross.

There are details within the speech that enable me now to show how the Electronic Immortality that I've been talking about can be implemented:

You use the ubiquity of memory storage to make the complete record of a person's life that Stross talks about in his speech and then, at the time of death, imprint that stored memory onto an artificially created piece of equipment which may or may not have mobility.

I'm fascinated that his speech also talks about exactly the same type of privacy questions that have just been discussed here in the article before last and extrapolates them to a future world where we all are in wikipedia.

Well worth a read.

Tom

Labels: future, immortality, science and technology, Tet

I've been noticing lately that in my small hometown's paper, half of the printed pages are filled with legal notices of foreclosure on properties financed by GMAC and other sub-prime lenders. I've been looking at the general overpricing of stocks and the economic crisis stress points around the world, and I am now ready to make precise predictions concerning world markets. Billy Joe was chiding me the other day for being too vague in my statements, so I am going to be as specific as I can.

1) In the future, a date in the period March 1-May 1st 2007 will be cited as the appoximate start of the next market crash.

2) The crash will be induced by the failure of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States due to excessive numbers of foreclosures and subsequent investigations by the SEC triggering interlocking financial systems' reactions world-wide.

3) In the areas in which housing prices have been most overinflated, I expect a drop of between 40 and 50% in real valuation before the market bottoms out. I don't expect the property values to reach the values currently exhibited in terms of real money until at least the early 2030s, if then.

4) Top 6 housing markets where the fall will be greatest: Boston, NYC, Ft. Lauderdale, Washington DC, Detroit and LA.

5) The American market's collapse will trigger major sell-offs in foreign stock markets. It could be as high as an 80% adjustment in some Asian markets. Even the Chinese markets could drop as much as 30-40%.

6) The bear markets will end and the valuation of stocks will be back at the present levels by about October of 2009 or so.

I've used a lot of sources to determine these estimates, ranging from David Lindorff to Jim Rogers with a good dose of common sense and engineering systems analysis. We're at a saddle-point in the systems where even a small perturbation can be magnified and result in international repercussions.

Are these predictions specific enough for you now, Billy Joe? Let's keep track and see how many of these are correct.

Tom

Labels: future, investments, Tet

Folks that have listened to me speak are certainly aware that I'm a proponent of what is termed SMIILE--Space Migration, Intelligence Increase and Life Extension. Ever since the death of Robert Anton Wilson, I've been meaning to tell some stories about him, Doctor Leary, the Illuminatus Trilogy and the High Weirdness Weekend(tm). If you don't know who Timothy Leary is, I suggest you follow this link first.

Let me start out by talking about my buddy, Scout. When I arrived at the University of Illinois in 1970, I felt intimidated by the older hippies there. Even though most of them were three years older or less than I was, they had lived through massive changes within the Twin Cities--the start of the Community Council (the alternative city government), the establishment of West Main Street in Urbana as the Hippy Ghetto, the burning of the North End and the campus demonstrations and riots. Being a poor farm boy from a graduating class of 28, it was hard to get the cow manure scraped off of my shoes.

Scout was my native guide. When he drew himself up to his full height, he nearly reached 5 foot 2 inches and his weight managed to hit 93 pounds if he had just eaten and not shot any speed for a day or two. This was before the radical hippies had long hair in the Midwest, so he had a ducktail with a goatee and handlebar mustache. To tell the truth, he looked like the Mayor of Munchkinland would, had the part been played by Satan.

Scout taught me how to tell stories, how to flirt with a woman and that being from a small town wasn't necessarily a handicap, since we had a tendency to speak plainly. He introduced me to the rest of the hippies and made sure that I was as comfortable as possible.

He had a great story, though, about Doctor Tim. It was the autumn of one of the years right before I got to school. Scout was wandering through the basement of the Illini Union and noticed a tall man in a white robe with a flower-chain around his neck who was wearing sandals in an Illinois November. Scout walked up to him and said, "Doctor Leary, I presume?"

Scout would say, "He dug it!" and go on talking about the wise sage and his philosophies. At the time, Leary had mysteriously vanished from prison and the Weather Underground was hiding him somewhere in the country. Every week, there would be a "Leary Sighting" somewhere or another. Finally, the Doctor surfaced in Switzerland.

Fast forward now to the early 1980s. Leary had been recaptured and spent a few more years in prison. I had lost track of what was going on with him, since I was drinking about as much as he was at the time. Imagine my surprise when I found a flyer announcing a debate by him and G. Gordon Liddy, (the man who had arrested him while Liddy was working for the State's Attorney's office in NY state.) They were going to be at the Auditorium in the next week, so a bunch of us got together and got there very early to get good seats.

It was a strange, strange debate. Liddy took the side of the traditionalist, all-American believer in patriotism and manifest destiny. Leary didn't really look at the audience as much as look through them at a cosmic target somewhere on the other side of Venus. He spoke of trans-humanity resulting from the unlocking of higher states of conciousness and how they would allow us to colonize the galaxy. Liddy kept looking at him with raised eyebrows and Leary would smile knowingly across the intervening space.

Afterwards, my friends and I decided to head for Coslow's, which was a campus bar that was a socialist/intellectual hangout. (They also had nachos that people had crawled six blocks after a hard night of drinking to obtain.) We had reached Daniels Street, the home of the Frat Bar Extraordinaire, Kam's, when we noticed a very lost-looking Guru of Psychedelia talking to a not-so-bright, but extremely beefy bouncer.

"Excuse us, Doctor Leary?"

"Yes?"

"What seems to be the problem here?"

"Well , these nice young men from a fraternity told me that this would be a good place for me to get a drink, but the attendant here at the door doesn't want to let me in."

"Hey, we know a much better place a block over, come on...."

So, we trooped over to Coslow's where folks like Railroad Terry, his sister Jan and Rasta Wilson were already sitting at this bar's version of the Group W Bench. The incoming four of us, including Tim, sat down and, of course, ordered nachos.

What followed was a couple of the strangest two hours of my life. We all talked about big things, future things, evolutionary things. The Good Doctor dominated the conversation, of course. He explained that human beings were a product of their brain's wiring, which was a result of both their genetics and environment. This wiring enabled or retarded their development in life depending on how it agreed with what was necessary to get by in life. This wasn't all, though. It was possible, using various psycho-active substances, meditation or ceremonial magic to rewire parts of the brain--the programming could be altered, just as a computer's programs could be altered by installing new instructions. At closing time, we parted. Some of us were shaking our heads and the rest were very far away, envisioning a world where the evolved lived like some kind of secret superheroes.

Another nine years passed. I realized that I was not utilizing my full potential, so I found a job working on a project investigating the first few microseconds of the universe's existence at Fermilab. The conversation with Leary had demonstrated to me that we could rise above our circumstances and that each one of us had the potential to contribute greatness to humanity.

During Labor Day weekend of 1991, kitten and I attended the World Science-Fiction Convention in Chicago. It was an amazing weekend, since during the period beginning on Thursday and ending on the following Monday, the following events were simultaneously taking place in Chicago:

The World SF Convention
The NORML Legalize Marijuana Activist Convention
The Chicago Jazz Festival
The opening of the Battletech Center, the first VR video arcade
The Libertarian Party Presidential Nominating Convention
The Wilson-Leary Virtual Reality Roadshow

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the greatest panel ever in the history of weird--a full two hours featuring Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, and Philip Jose Farmer. During the panel, the members spoke on the nature of reality, the paranoid truths of the Illuminatus Trilogy, and "where do we go from here?" for humanity. Wilson threw in his pet theory that, since English didn't have a number-for-letter transposition possible, anagrams were the way in which to do English gematria.

Following the discussion, I wandered down the street to where Leary and Wilson had their show set up. It had a bank of DEC computers and heavy air-conditioning. They had a helmet and glove combination. I sat in a chair and they fitted me with the helmet, which covered my entire field of vision, (even the peripheral) and slid the glove onto my hand.

The screen turned on on the inside and it was no big deal. It was a badly-depicted version of Seattle, nothing to see here.....

And then I turned my head, the view turned with me and my brain lurched (as did my stomach) when I suddenly was in the middle of a badly-depicted reality. Seattle was there, around me, moving. It was the strangest thing that I had ever seen. Then, Tim said, "Point the finger of the glove up." And I did. And I began flying. I could control my movements with the glove. I soared over the skyline, did laps around the Space Needle and dive-bombed some orcas in the middle of the Sound. I did this for what seemed like hours, yet only took the fifteen minutes for which I had paid.

When I finished, I looked at them and said, "How long? How long before this is everywhere?" Tim chuckled and RAW said, "Well, my guess is that it'll be used first for pornography and recreation long before it ever makes it to use in day-to-day life. That's all right, when humanity needs it, it'll be ready."

They're both gone now, but every time I walk down the road in TES:Oblivion or fly over Paragon City on my way to a meeting of the Global Heroics Supergroup in City of Heroes I think about them and raise a silent toast. We're not there yet, perhaps a generation more, but we're going somewhere else. Sometimes I worry I'll end up like Moses on the wrong side of the Jordan forever in the end, but other times I know that I've been at least afforded a glimpse of the Promised Land.

Tom

Labels: future, history, personal, Tet, weirdness