Meeting notice: The 03.Sept 16 meeting will be held at 7:30 
P.M. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down 
from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and 
can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we 
are. More details below.


Suggested topic:  Religion and the Singularity


Though we read that 77% of Americans believe in angels and only 28% in 
evolution, it is rare for most of us to actually bump into a person 
who admits to these views.  However, it is not rare to encounter a 
person who not only believes but is eager to assert that robots and AI 
will eventually be responsible for large, persisting, levels of 
unemployment.  This proposition is, from the point of view of either 
conventional economic theory or the actual experience of the last 
several centuries (during which a great deal of technology has been 
installed in the workplace) almost as weird.  Nonetheless, it is 
prevalent.

Here is the argument that I find works best against such obduracy: 
imagine you have a business that grosses a million a year.  Your only 
expense is a $900,000 payroll.  You go home with $100,000.  Now 
someone invents a gizmo that does the work of your employees.  You 
fire them all.  Suddenly your takehome goes to a million $.

What do you do with that money?  Unless you burn it in the back yard, 
which while physically possible is unlikely, you are either going to 
use it to negotiate a transaction of some sort or you are going to put 
it in a bank, which will loan it out to people who will use it to 
negotiate, etc.  The only mid-term difference made by the 
technological change is that money that was handed to A, B, and C, is 
now going to D, E, and F.  Technological changes can and do alter the 
mix and flow of transactions, but unless they actually destroy money 
itself somehow, the gross level of employment  is conserved.   As 
history testifies abundantly.

However, it is true that the mix and flow of transactions is altered. 
In general technology shifts employment from jobs that can be 
automated to those cannot; from jobs that have specifiable, rule-
governed, relations between inputs and outputs, to those that do not. 

The best, and possibly the only, example of the latter genre is 
religion, defined as selling access to the supernatural.  That job is 
inherently unautomatable, since It is the essence of the supernatural 
not to be meterable.  (You can never get a reliable head count of 
saved souls at time T that can be compared with those saved at T+1. ) 
This group includes Feng shui specialists, psychics, very much 
including pet psychics, and all the varieties of New Age healing and 
counselling, from aromatherapists to craniosacral balancers to 
empathologists to Sweat Lodge Masters and exorcists.  

While I can imagine someone writing (and for that matter getting a 
patent on) software that balances your vibrations or repolarizes your 
energy centers, I cannot imagine that such a product would take a 
dollar of clientage away from an actual vibration balancer. Similarly, 
no matter how good AI gets, it is very hard to imagine robot priests, 
ministers, rabbis, and imams ever disemploying humans. (Churches have 
problem enough dealing with gays and women.) 

So we should not be surprised to see such figures as those above, or 
the spread of fundamentalism and its expansion into politics, or the 
steady growth of New Age culture.  The further we go into the future, 
the more our society will look and feel like the Middle Ages.  It's 
just the nature of the process, and is neither more nor less 
exponential in form.


<-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> 


In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited 
the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

<-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> 

Announcement Archive: 
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

<-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><->

Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on 
the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, 
which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and 
little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps 
having received a sample via a forward) send the string 
'subscribe nsg'  to majordomo@world.std.com.  Unsubs follow the 
same model.  

Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be 
subscribed to separately.  You must be subscribed to nsg-d to 
post to it and must post from the address from which you 
subscribed (An anti- spam thing).

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: 
nsg@pobox.com.