Since returning from Denver, Kai is having a hard time getting back into his old routine. He’s had a tantrum every day. Technically he didn’t have one yesterday, as it didn’t start until after midnight. And not long after it ended he had another one. He has quite a strong will now - much more so than when he was a baby - so the tantrums can really drag on. The first one was triggered by his dissatisfaction with the arrangement of his blankets (”the blankets are going crazy daddy!”) and the second one by his desire to go downstairs at 2:30AM rather than go to sleep. His tantrums almost always happen when he’s sleepy, as I think that’s when he’s least able to control himself. Since I have to get up at 5:15 to make it to work (I work 6:30-3), I’ve had about 2 hours of sleep. I’ll be ok as long as I get some decent sleep tonight.
Otherwise, Kai and I have been having a really good time. With my work schedule, I spend time with him in the afternoon while Maria finishes her work. The weather is getting nice enough that we can play outside now, which means Kai gets to play with the other kids in the neighborhood. Yesterday it was a game of tag/hide-and-seek with two 7 year olds. Kai got tired after a while, so he made me carry him and run up and down the block. With the extra weight I wasn’t any faster than the kids, so it was a fair game. I certainly got my exercise for the day!
I’d like to expand on my point yesterday about the relevance of science fiction. But bear with me as it will take a while for me to get to my point. Along the way I’ll make points about other things.
The pace of technological change is every-increasing, and, just as an example, one area where it’s going to have a huge impact over the next quarter century is the labor market. Both the top and the bottom of the workforce are going to be squeezed.
The Top: there’s already a lot of buzz about high-tech jobs (like mine!) being outsourced to India, South Africa, etc. Politically, this poses a fundamental problem for the arguments previously used in favor of free trade. The idea (but not neccessarily the reality) always was that the manual labor and low-tech jobs got pushed to less-developed countries overseas, while the advanced capitalist countries continued to improve and expand the range of products, technologies, and jobs they created. So the new wrench in this argument is that plenty of countries now have workforces that are just as well educated and offer the same set of skills as the US workforce, and they’re available at a fraction of the cost. Ultimately the only jobs that will be “safe” - anywhere in the world - are the ones that require direct personal interaction, localized skills, or simply being physically present: doctors, janitors, real estate agents, cooks, construction workers, etc. But wait…many of those will get squeezed too…
The Bottom: I was just reading up on the current state of robotic technology. The current projection is that within the next 10 years or so we’ll have robots with reasonably good vision and manual dexterity. We already have robots that are pretty good at factory line work, vacuuming floors, cutting grass, etc. What does that mean? It means that once they’re mass-produced, say goodbye to migrant farm worker jobs, janitorial jobs, burger-flipping jobs, lawn mowing jobs, etc.
While this dynamic at the low-skill end of the scale is nothing new - remember the story of John Henry? - this is different because it’s going to happen at a faster pace and with a broader scope than ever before. At the same time, the high-skill jobs are spreading to numerous countries where costs and wages are lower. The US will not be able to sustain the quantity or the wages of those jobs within its borders.
So who has a safe job? The low-skill jobs will be automated. The high-skill jobs - other than those that require highly specialized skills or physically being in a particular place - will be outsourced (or have their wages reduced). It turns out that many doctors may not even fall into the “safe” category: the British now ship cataract surgery patients to India and back - even with the travel expenses it’s still a fraction of the cost of doing it in England. In the long run, so the free-trade argument goes, the countries where the jobs get outsourced will bring their living standards up to ours (assuming no environmental catastrophes due to the massive resource extraction and pollution that would entail, but that’s another story), and then there’s no need to keep outsourcing. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said “in the long run we’re all dead.”
The “ideal” idea behind technological improvement is to make people’s lives easier: to automate the boring stuff (washing machines), get us places faster (cars and planes), etc. The “sinister” idea is to make people irrelevant, except as consumers. But if they can’t work, how can they consume? One outcome is that we all live lives of leisure while the machines do the work. Another possible outcome is a deeply polarized and stratified society, with a small enriched ruling class, and everyone else in grinding poverty. A third, and probably most likely outcome, is at least limited protectionism, such as exists in Japan and France. This will happen as the pain wrought in trying to reach the “long run” I just described will be deemed too high a price to pay for low prices. At least some “inefficient” sectors of the economy will be protected, depending on the political strength of those sectors.
I should say, of course, that I could be proven wrong. When major advances happen - such as the spread of the Internet - it usually triggers a boom, as you end up with a whole new area of the economy that needs to be populated with workers. A continuous series of such booms could continue to sustain a middle class through these changes. Historically, they only happen a couple times per century though, and when the booms end there is is considerable upheaval, such as the .com crash.
Another, positive possibility is that “the long run” ends up happening in the short run: global markets grow at a pace roughly equal to the global spread of jobs. That is, outsourcing to say, India, would lead to growing demand for those same services within India, wages would go up there, and then there’s no longer a cost-basis for outsourcing. But I haven’t seen any evidence pointing to that outcome.
So what does this have to do with science fiction? Well, it seems that you have to turn to science fiction to find any kind of discussion of these kinds of futuristic concerns. I’m not saying that science fiction is about economics. I am saying that it gives you a window into thinking about the future. All the old sci-fi stories about the role of robots in society may be relevant sooner that you think. When ideas that were once only in the realm of science fiction are thrust upon society, we are generally ill-prepared to tackle them. For example, advances such as cloning don’t seem to get any kind of really thoughtful public discussion. Only fear-mongering on one side, and complacency on the other. So how we end up absorbing these changes into our society ends up being driven pretty much by whatever way the wind blows. So a little movie like Robot Stories, which illustrates the impact of technology through very personal tales, is one way to get people to start thinking about these issues.
The other day I heard an interview with the director of the new low-budget sci-fi film Robot Stories. Here’s the web site: http://www.robotstories.net/ - unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s going to make it to Philly. The film consists of 4 short stories. I’m most keen to see the last of the four “Clay”. It’s about an aging sculptor, trying to finish his final work, but his body is falling apart on him. In this story, people can have their consciousness scanned and uploaded, and that’s what old folks and the dying do, so they can live on. Once uploaded, they can merge with all the knowledge and experience of others who have been uploaded, and they live in a sort of digital nirvana. So his kids and his already-dead-and-scanned wife are gently telling him, “Dad, it’s time to upload.” I gather the story focuses on his internal struggle between fulfilling his families wishes, the innate desire to live on, and trying to retain an important aspect of his humanity: his mortality.
To me this is what good science fiction is all about. It’s not about big budgets and battles in space. It’s about understanding our own humanity, and providing some kind of moral framework for understanding where we, as a society, may be headed. Through the use of plot devices not available in other kinds of story telling (e.g. another one of the stories in the film is about a couple that’s required to adopt a robot baby before they will be given a real baby), science fiction can offer a fresh perspective on what it means to be human.
This is why I’ve been a fan of Philip K. Dick for so long (the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report were based on his stories). He was writing these kinds of stories in the 50s, long before anyone else was. (And long before we were hit over the head with Data in Star Trek). If you’re looking for a good read, I’d recommend his novels VALIS and and Time Out of Joint . BTW, the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” is what they based “Total Recall” on. I like the short story title better, but I suppose that’s too many words for the title of a Hollywood movie 
I had to watch the 10 hour Lord of the Rings trilogy in order to learn that even the smallest person can save the world. Well last night I learned the same lesson in 25 minutes, watching Horton Hears a Who. “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” and it’s the smallest of all that ends up saving all the Whos in Whoville.
Yesterday one of my coworkers showed me http://www.phonespell.org/. Turns out my number has the phrase JEW-DEW in it. I think I’ll put that on my business cards ;-). All you HTML geeks will sympathize with my jealously over my coworkers office number: TXT-AREA.
I picked up Kai and Maria at the airport last night. I’m very happy to have them both home again! They were both exhausted, and Kai’s voice was hoarse, and he had lost some weight. It was a vacation of extremes: they alternated between Kai having a lot of fun, and having horrible tantrums (usually several each day, including the middle of the night). As I mentioned before, he rarely has tantrums at home. We’ve traveled with him before, but this was the first time he’s gone away with just one parent. So, note to other parents: don’t send your toddler on vacation with just one parent! I got a sample of his tantrums as we drove home from the airport. For the whole ride home, he was crying like a broken record, “go away Mommy - I don’t like you”. His tantrum didn’t end until about 45 minutes after we got home. He finally settled down and had some dinner, and he had a good night’s sleep (I think for the first time since they left).
But they also had a lot of fun. Kai is very proud of his performance in his skiing lessons. He’s told me several times how he was skiing, going up the kiddie lift, etc., all by himself. Tony (Maria’s dad) also went skiing for the first time in 50 years. The first time down he realized too late that he didn’t remember how to stop, and had a massive wipeout. But he was unfazed and kept on skiing for several hours (after re-learning how to stop!). Kai had a lot of fun visiting with his Aunt Yoko and Uncle James (Maria’s sister and her boyfriend) too. They all went to Red Rocks, and Kai got to run around on the stage - given his recent obsession with the Eurythmics concert videos, being on stage was a big deal for him. Maria took a lot of pictures with the digital camera, so I’ll try to download them this weekend and post them on the site.
Maria has a lot of work to catch up on, so it’ll be a Daddy and Kai weekend. Here’s to hoping that he settles back into his old groove quickly!
Two different views on Greenspan’s recommendation the other day that Social Security needs to be trimmed:
Paul Krugman - Krugman is very much on the left, and he’s sometimes on shaky ground when talking pure politics. But he’s an economist, and usually makes good arguments on economic issues. I think this is one of the best columns he’s written in a while.
Bruce Bartlett [article no longer online] - I’m not as familiar with him, but I think his argument represents a fairly typical Republican stance on this issue. But his case is not as well-informed as Krugman’s. I did like this bit at the end of his column though: “According to internal administration memoranda just released by journalist Ron Suskind, author of a recent book about former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, there is serious question as to whether Bush really understands what he has proposed [private savings accounts] or could defend it effectively in a debate.”
I heard an Alistair Cooke quote on the radio yesterday, I forget the exact wording, but it went something like this: “self-confidence is the feeling you have when you think no one is suspicious” I like that - a lot.
My buddy Pat W (a link to his blog is on your right) is in a band called Lavajet. I saw them for the first time in DC about a month ago - very fun rock, “reminiscent of punk” (in their words). They just put out a CD, which I haven’t heard yet, but I was browsing the Lavajet site and I absolutely loved the title: “We Are Here to Protect You.” That has to be one of the best album titles ever!
My good friends Jay and Pauline recently moved to India. Jay is doing research on AIDS for a pharmaceutical company there. And it’s my understanding that they just asked him to be a VP. They plan to be there for a couple years. I’ve set up a blog for them at http://www.toppa.com/india [now retired]. I’ve made a first post on their behalf, consisting of the first group-email they sent out. Hopefully they’ll start making posts soon!
