Fresh out of my college career, it seems appropriate that while I search for daintiful employment ever out of reach by a hair (or in my case, a chasm of inexperience and stupidity on my part) I look forward to all the potential happenings in my time on this ball of rock and iron flying through space. As a mostly cynical person, it seems odd that I have an optimistic outlook on human potential, especially given the history of empires rising and falling under their own hubris, and being a resident of the currently only remaining global empire, it seems like a forgone conclusion as we approach another presidental election playing out like a sitcom between two talking heads that Americas time is nearing its ultimate demise if radical change doesn't happen, and it would have to happen as a movement of peoples empowered through knowledge using modern technology.
On that note, I want to dedicate a post of this blog to exploring all the potential greatnesses of man that might fall within my life. Maybe we might even reach immortality this century, and maybe I will become productive enough to afford such a miracle. Regardless, there are many paths the whole lot of us may walk, and I like to hypthesize them as a thought experiement. So here they are, in an order I would consider the greatest potential to the least. This will be a series on this topic, since each idea can take up its own post.
1. Fully Automated Agriculture - singularity is a popular term in science fiction to denote the point where machines become sophisticated enough to improve themselves without human intervention, leading to a sudden tremendous increase in technological power solely off the innovations and revelations of the computers themselves. While that will fall lower on this list, it is fully in the realm of possibility that this decade sees a third industrial revolution - the first was a revoluition of power, the second was a revolution of silicon and information, and this third one would be a revolution of work.
We can already see the saplings of this revolution taking root - from military drones acting independently, to self-driving cars, to Foxconn in China firing the grossly underpaid staff that man their factories to replace them with cheaper automated production lines. I feel the greatest revelation will come firstly in the form of agriculture - today, one of the last vestiges of manual labor that persistently dominates the American economy is the handling and picking of fruited plants that are not easily harvested by combines in the same way potatoes, carrots, soy, wheat, or corn are. I'm looking at you, raspberries, priced at almost $5 a box. More sophisticated advances in robotics will absolutely produce machines capable of analyizing these delecate plants and extracting their fruits with precision currently found in 3d printers and car manufacturing lines of today - except it will require an analysis of an environment rather than a programmed behavior, which is many orders of magnitude harder to properly construct in software, which is the main limitation of this breakthrough.
A rant for another time, but there is another delimiter of this revolution - and it isn't even the grotesque agribusiness and corrupt farming market of America - it is an introverted community of innovation that is focusing more and more on profit and less and less on value of creation. It is a society-wide depreciating behavior that is emerging rapidly in this information age of ours, since as we get more connected and intertwined the stakes are raised and competition becomes ever more fierce. There are few, if any, dollars out there going into proper revolutionary research, especially when easy money grabs like stealing a few fractions of Facebooks market share promise vastly lower risk with tremendous returns if successful. It is a depressing reality that true innovation is falling to the wayside, as investment is drastically favoring the easy money grabs of the day over revolutionizing society for the better.
The implications of this automated revolution will be more of a shift in culture and morals than anything else - the realization that we have entered an era of "free" resources, where no human input is needed in the production of goods and services while the fruits of the labor go to those who funded the initial creation of such devices rather than those that reap the labor. In the same way the modern copyright stranglehold hurts content creativity by allowing the lucky few who storm the market to sit on their laurels and make perpetual profits on products rendered decades prior, the same will inevitably come of this automated revolution - but in the same way it is inevitable that humanity as a whole will discard bygone conceptions of how digital information be restricted to a select few to allow the distribution, when the distribution itself is inherently free, once we have automated cars and robots that can harvest and deliver food directly to those that desire it, requiring no human input as they are powered by sun, thermal, nuclear and as they transport independently of human intervetion, we will realize the futility in the capital market we have in place - because as things get worse, as the game becomes more and more winner take all, the tremendous wealth divide will either destroy us, or propel us into a new era of reason, where resources are not distributed based on who took an idea to market first and captured the business, but by those who will put in the effort to improve what has come before them.
But agriculture as a fully automated business is not just a potential happening, it is inevitable in my eyes - the writing is on the walls across the board, it is so close that we could potentially have it within months if the bastions of old money stood aside for the sake of progress, in that we could develop and put in place a system of automated farming to such an extent as to feed the world in a few short years of time. Once the human element is removed, we will have one of the greatest utopian ideals throughout literary history - free and plentiful food.
Not to sound too cheery or optimistic, there are many ways this can go wrong. Besides the capatalist paradigm shift mandated by the removal of the human element from the means of production in this case, there also needs to be a rapid shift to market of these concepts upon their implementaiton or else it might become akin to organic crops of today - a passing fad. There is also the factor that as the value of unskilled labor drops, the motivative force driving these kinds of innovations becomes more lax, and I'd aruge that is the current reason such a revolution has not already happened - be it the slaves of old or the slaves of today, who lack mobility in both social and monetary form, who are forced to slave on land for those with more than enough to spare to try to feed themselves and those around them, who can't take the risk without risking their livelihood - they are still functionally dirt cheap, in most nations around the globe. If the value of unskilled labor goes up (and as another quip, it never will again, because we are accelerating our overpopulation of the globe at the same time as computerized innovation is supplanting the need for almost all unskilled workers) we will see a more rapid drive to this kind of automated utopic state. I hope for the best on this front, since there is so much potential that can arise so soon.
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