Malthusians, Luddites & Marxists, oh my!

Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum gets into a snit with modern Aasimovians over one of the nerdiest arguments ever: will smart robots lead us all to a paradise of plenty, or to a hellhole of poverty and misery?  The trouble with these discussions is that it is hard for many to get past the nerdy veneer (yeah, it does kind of smell like one of those "Superman vs. Batman" discussions the stoner comic book kids used to have). 

But you should get past it if you can, because it leads to some fantastically interesting and meaningful stuff.  The great thing about older science fiction (Aasimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, etc.) is that it used science and technology as a platform for discussion of meaningful questions about human nature and society.  This genre was premised on the recognition that the human condition is eternal, and that scientific and technological advancement are simply a new vehicle for the age-old questions of how we deal with the corrupting influence of power and greed.

Of late, however, in our present age of digital triumphalism, technologists seem to believe that they have created something entirely new that should not be bound by old-thought conventions.  [Antitrust law? Pah! Those silly old rules don't apply to us!]  To my mind, this is a dangerous way of thinking.  In terms of intellectual and moral capacity, we have not changed significantly in the last 50,000 years (I often remember my Earth Sciences teacher doing a lesson on the nature of geologic time, driving home the point that modern humans are really pretty new and that 50,000 years is not a long period of time.  He showed a slide of some cavemen dressed in furs and said, "any one of these guys could have gone to Dartmouth."  True dat.)

The point is only this: scientific and technological advancements necessarily increase the value of capital and decrease the value of labor.  As such, they always raise the possibility of increased economic oppression of the working classes.  The question is whether we have developed social mechanisms that allow us to adjust to the new economic conditions. 

I believe Drum is right to raise the question, and Beeson is wrong to dismiss the problem.  True enough: society adjusted to the techonological displacements of the industrial revolution and we created a prosperity more broadly shared than human society had ever known.  It took decades of terrible violence and social upheaval for this to happen, however, and it was no sure thing.  What will happen now?