Editor's Blog
November 4, 2009
Are we moving toward the sort of industrial nanotech promised by K. Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation?
From Science Daily: "Rice University scientists have unveiled a method for the industrial-scale processing of pure carbon-nanotube fibers that could lead to revolutionary advances in materials science, power distribution and nanoelectronics."
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3 Comments
It sure doesn’t look like it. Sure we have nanoparticles in our sunblock lotion and more memory in our ipods but our economic paradigm dictates that if you don’t work you can’t afford to live comfortably. Increasing productivity leads to decreasing employment and so the majority can’t enjoy the abundance that is produced. Big business will learn to exploit nanotechnology for profit, but as they employ fewer workers they will find fewer consumers until enough people demand a new economic paradigm for the fruits of the nanobots labor.
The word ‘economize’ (which is often interpreted as the opposite of “making abundant”) is a relatively recent entry in the dictionary and its “scarcity creating” connotation pertains to the current type of ecosystem we have today. It has nothing to do with the authentic meaning of the word economy, which simply means the study of ecosystems.
There is such a thing as an Economy of Abundance.
As an example, check out: http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Energy_Economy which is a work in progress.
It’s due for an update which will include regulating the number of energy producers using quality of service as a threshold and relying on natural human tendency to err to keep the number of energy producers limited while allowing abundance in energy flow and the production of goods and services.
This is absolutely baseless. All economic research proves that productivity does not reduce jobs. Rather, there is more job growth in the most productive region. There may be temporary job displacement, but, for instance, the growth in service sector jobs has been responsible for all job growth in the US over the past thirty years. We have been losing manufacturing jobs while expanding higher paying intellectual property jobs, research, and financial services. Look into it.