Meeting notice: The 04.June.01 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 of the week:  NT and income inequality.

A question often raised about the relation of society to nanotech, or 
indeed to any advanced technology, is its relation to people's 
willingness to be motivated by money.  Given a huge jump in 
productivity, will people retire -- do art, pursue hobbies, volunteer 
for charitable organizations -- or will they keep earning?  It's an 
important question -- it is hard to overstate the importance our 
society places on the assumption of a respect for price signals -- but 
so far one without a definitive answer.  

On the one hand plenty of people retire young, and anyone who has 
worked for an organization knows the feeling of being surrounded by 
colleagues who palpably, often explicitly, lust after retirement from 
their first working day.  On the other, there are plenty of people who 
never retire, and it does seem as though if we had wanted to spend the 
productivity gains of the last fifty years on retirement the average 
working lifespan would down to about ten years now.

So perhaps the prudent course is to assume both: the development of a 
bimodal civilization in which lots of people retire in their 30's and 
lots keep on getting and spending until they die, which, given our 
assumptions about the likely progress of health care, amounts to 
hundreds of years of getting and spending.  This is obviously a 
formula for a truly stupendous level of income inequality, orders of 
magnitude more imposing than what we have now. (Assuming income 
transfer programs remain at current levels.) 

One possible reaction is that this is a bad thing.  Even those of us 
unaccustommed to worrying about inequality might want to take a second 
to contemplate life in a culture in which the average income of the 
poorest percentile is like a million times less that the average 
income of the richest.  The cultural gap, the difference in life 
style, between the statistical average and the wealthiest few percent 
would approximate that between Greek shepards of the bronze age and 
the gods on Olympus.   For better or worse, it is hard to imagine such 
a society surviving as any kind of democracy. 

Another reaction is that it doesn't matter,  because it is the nature 
of advanced technology to erase the difference between income levels 
and therefore the social meaning of inequality. Consider for example 
clothing.  While it is still possible for mavens to distinguish a $300 
suit from a $3000 suit, the difference between the clothes that a 
statistically average and a rich person would buy is much less obvious 
than it was a hundred years ago, and was less obvious in 1904 than in 
1804, etc.  Thus, in a high- tech society, being rich will be like 
playing a game.  The people who do it will be people who like to play 
that particular game, but the cultural and social implications will be 
limited. (Of course time will always be money in the old sense; space 
however might not, depending on what you think about the future of 
synthetic worlds). 

Finally, you might feel greater income equality is a good thing, in 
that the Second Law teaches us that the steeper the gradients in a 
society the more energetic, the more charged, the more creative and 
interesting, it is likely to be.  Income inequality seems to have the 
effect of increasing the diversity of cultural microniches in a 
society (consider popular music, and how it ranges from hip-hop and 
reggae through Frank Sinatra to opera).  It increases variation in attitudes towards the value of a buck -- for some, spending ten thousand on a painting is an impulse buy; for others, it is an obscenity -- and this variation is probably a good thing.  


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

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the 
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refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

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