So far, NOT so good (Where has technology gotten us, and where is it taking us?).

I consider myself a technophile; Understanding and using technology keeps a roof over my head and food on the table. And what an exciting ride the latter part of the 20th century has been for technology!

Even as far back as 100 years ago, there have always been established businesses (such as buggy-whip makers) in the position to be made obsolete by the latest cutting-edge technologies (like the automobile). The technologist's attitude has always been something like: "Luddites! Get with the times and stop worrying so much. When a door closes, a widow opens, if you pay attention and learn your binary math, like the rest of us.

If you are a farmer and the harvester is invented, learn to fix tractors instead. If you are a travel agent and the Internet now lets everyone book their own travel, learn to sell websites or SEO. If you are a clerk, and QuickBooks is invented, learn Business Intelligence. If you are a weather observer, and equipment takes your job, learn to support software for a living. Work your way back up from the bottom if you have to (again, this type of thing has been the mantra of all of us who don't want to be accused of yelling "who moved my cheese!")

There have always been people warning that robots and AI will eventually put the vast majority of blue collar workers out of a job. I avoided worrying about this because 1) that's a long way off 2) hopefully we can evolve as a society before this happens, where money isn't needed (you know, like in Star Trek) 3) technology has a lot to give humankind before it takes it all away, if that ever happens.

But the truth now is: 1) if they have self-driving cars on the streets RIGHT NOW, and "big dog" and bipedal robots that can carry hundreds of pounds effortlessly, then maybe it isn't so far off!

2) the past 25 years had the biggest increase in worker productivity in history, due to computers and other technologies. Has this resulted in any type of societal shift, where mankind as a whole realizes there is enough food and wealth to go around, and the most important thing in the world is he contribution you can leave for all of mankind? NO.

In fact:
3) Technology may still be giving mankind a lot, but it seems that not all are in the position to catch these blessings as they fall from the sky. The proof is in the pudding, and the aforementioned record-breaking productivity has resulted in:

1. Record-breaking profits for companies (especially really big ones)

2. Record-breaking layoffs for workers

3. Record-breaking hoarding of cash by multinational corporations in offshore shell corporations to protect from taxes. Panama Papers, just broke 3 days ago.

4. Record-breaking unemployment and under-employment for regular people

5.  Record-breaking numbers of people signing up for government assistance

6. The decimation of the middle-class

7. The postponement of the American Dream for many while their salaries effectively stagnated for a decade.

8. Instead of society evolving, we actually seem to be getting worse. It's a presidential election year, and neither side of the political spectrum can stand their own candidates, much less the other side's.

9. Greed, corruption, graft, Machiavellism, etc. rules the day. Don't get me started on how close Donald Trump has come to running the whole thing literally (and the fat lady hasn't sung on that yet)!

If this is what somehow, eventually leads up to a Star-Trek utopia where people get to follow their passions I stead of following a carrot on a stick their whole lives, I'm not seeing it. And they haven't even invented a free-walking robot that fools people in the same room into thinking that they are real people yet.

But maybe it isn't technology we should fear, but what mankind does with technology.

Today's blog contains a logical discussion on a political subject.
It was written to be readable from the viewpoint that Climate Change (CC) is the gospel truth, or from the viewpoint that CC is akin to witchcraft, and is tantamount to scaremongering. Please don't read your beliefs (or anyone else's) into my words; Assume I am neutral (if you believe in such a concept).
After watching Tomorrowland (2015 George Clooney, Hugh Laurie), it became much more clear in my mind why people who identify as conservative can be so much more resistive to the concept of Climate Change, and the implications that seem to be the natural results of that concept.
I was raised conservative, though I tend to identify more centrist these days. I have viewed the world from the conservative viewpoint for several years as an adult, so I could be qualified to make these observations.

The most generic definition of political conservatism is the resistance to change from the current state of things. Accepting CC and all its implications is a huge change, fundamentally, of mindset, regarding the relationship between man and the earth. Not a few conservatives have the mindset that the earth and all of the resources on it are, by design, created for the use of mankind. In addition to the Big Bang and Evolution, conservatives are also being asked to believe that, in fact, God did not create the earth for man to use as he sees fit. A conservative might say something along the lines of: "If the world as we know it is coming to an end due to our wickedness, where's our Noah?"
The other big (and more immediately affecting) change is how CC changes every single man-made system in the world, and how they work, going forward. The implications of Climate change are what really upsets a conservative's apple cart. Conservatives can easily be among those who intuitively understand what happens when there is a shortage of an important substance (I don't think many Doomsday Preppers vote Democratic very often). The shortage of a commodity can get ugly very quickly, unless there are viable alternatives, or unless the shortage is with something we can easily do without. Climate Change implies the eventual shortage of habitable land, fresh water, and other staples that are critical for survival in general. But those are the eventual consequences, while it is the more immediate changes accepting CC would require us to make which more adequately explain why it's so hard for a conservative to swallow the Climate Change pill whole. Those implications to which I refer are this: The only way to prevent a man-made CC apocalypse is for people to stunt the growth of everything man made. The faster anything grows (population, commerce, any sort of progress) the more resources it uses. Even if everyone agreed on the concept of Climate Change, there is no way everyone will agree on what mankind's collective response should be. Have less children? The total fertility rate across the globe has halved since 1960 because better health care and technology means we don't need to have as many children, and because birth control means that people can more realistically decide whether or not to have another child. Christians and Muslims are the only groups of people whose current population and fertility rates suggest a majority share in the foreseeable future. Christians in America fit nicely into the conservative corner, and right now, the idea of there being more Muslims in the world than Christians would seem to have a larger likelihood to influence their reproductive choices than Climate Change would.
I realize that this part of my theory requires a zero-sum mentality, and not all conservatives have one. I also realize that innovation has and will continue to minimize the negative impact that each person and each percentage of growth has on the earth, as long as we keep that goal in our priorities. But unless someone comes out with a technology that makes more people and more growth become somehow good for the earth, my point stands.
Growth and progress has been the constant theme for the world in recorded history. Growth and progress have been the trend for just about everything man-made (over time), since the history of ever (generally speaking). By "growth" I am talking about the growth of population, revenue, income,  consumption, 'the tax base', the labor force, GDP, society, technology, etc., etc. For all intents and purposes, each of these things seems to be tied to all the others. Certainly no reasonable person advocates complete abandonment of progress for humankind altogether, but how do we divorce the growth of everything else from progress itself? I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm suggesting that it may be difficult enough that conservatives may prefer to try any number of things before embracing the slowing of all growth in general. If we are not immediately running out of resources, but the use of those resources is killing the planet, the most immediately obvious way to try to slow that effect is to pass laws that will seem to inherently prohibit growth itself. For the longest time, many conservatives have already believed that the concepts surrounding free enterprise and free markets are near to sacred, and conversely, nearly any artificial control of business or markets is the path to the dark side, with the potential to wreck whole economies, and enslave mankind in a socialistic or communistic hell of unintended consequences  and central control of  the country or the world by a small group of people ill-suited to run it.
America was founded on the idea that peoples' freedoms trumps any sort of "God-given" right of a king to rule said people. A major tenet of many American conservatives' belief system is the concept that any right not expressly given to the Federal government by the Constitution is effectively denied from the federal government, and reserved for more local governments to deal with as they see fit. So if you don't like a law in your state and can't get it changed, you have options to move to any of the other states where you like the laws better.  Climate Change throws all of this out the window. In fact, the less advanced countries will likely continue to effect CC more than the more advanced countries who restrict their own citizens from climate-harming activities. Those less-developed countries will also easily benefit from those same rules as long as they are developed enough to compete in any way with the advanced contries, since they don't have to follow the same self-limiting laws. This creates all sorts of problems for people who run businesses and who don't want to see third-world countries and companies from those countries become more powerful relative to their own, because their own countries "shot themselves in the foot" with the self-imposed limits of climate change laws and rules.
Until recently, there were still scientists around who would argue that either CC is not proven science, or that mankind's causative actions are not proven to be the driving force behind it (so there is no way to know if anything we do will have a positive effect in preventing the bad consequences). I haven't personally taken a poll among qualified scientist (not that I would know how), but it seems that scientists who are willing to say any of this are now few and far-between, or they have been effectively silenced or  discredited. The politics and hype around the entire subject has been so great that no evidence made readily available to everyday people can be considered unbiased.


None of what I have discussed (except the one sentence on innovation) does anything to help us take better care of our environment, but just in case anyone out there thought that conservatives are only willfully dense and stubborn, perhaps it can benefit everyone for these thought processes to be better understood.