The revolution(s) are coming

The world is on the brink of a major change. [citation needed].

The new printing press
The printing press triggered a major change because now suddenly people from all walks of life had access to books. The internet is the new printing press. It just skips the step between the authors mind, the publisher, the editor, the distribution channels and the shops that sell the damn things. It is instant knowledge at your fingertips. 

There are still some who wonder, but many people have learnt to "google it" . This change might seem insignificant, until you start digging in the internet. You find Wikipedia, which informs you about anything. When someone gives you a soundbite about Ghandi you search the internet to see if there is any weight to their statement. The internet makes it cheap to learn new things if you can afford it and makes it cheap to be a skeptic. You get to question that which you usually would have taken for granted because you either had no way to disprove it, or it was too low priority to make you drive to the library and see whether the information was accurate. 

The internet also breeds a lot of bad information, but what I have seen is that right tends to have more search results than wrong. It is not surprising that you will find the right info on .edu sights and the wrong info on Pastor McLyingbitchMotherFucker's blog website where he explains that in addition to creationism being true, aliens like to stick lollipops up our asses when we are not looking because they find the taste of our poop most pleasing. This grouping of bad information certainly seems intentional, but the purveyors of bullshit don't realise how they are screwing themselves over by including all their ridiculous beliefs on their 1995 animated gif black background magenta comic sans text nightmare website. 

 

The industrial revolution 2.0
The industrial revolution was triggered by the water frame, which essentially ended up making those spinning wheels from that other stupid fairy tale redundant. What followed was mass industrialization of just about everything that people used to do for fun and profit. This caused chaos as it meant many people losing their jobs, over urbanization due to factories needing thousands of workers doing menial repetitive stress injury inducing jobs.

We are now experiencing another industrial revolution. Things that used to be done on paper is now being done by computers. Important functions are now being done by computers. How many people do online banking? Or should I ask how many people still do their banking at the bank? Where are the folks that filled those job positions? They have moved on, but a major change or revolution can happen at any time, rendering people redundant and costing jobs. The savings will be moved onto the consumer... NOT!!! Banks will charge more. They are increasing profit after all. The super rich will have another way to be super rich, by letting machines do peoples' work and not letting their customers win some of the advantages.

The textile industry will see another industrial revolution when robots start to make clothing. Yup... Clothing is still made in Chinese sweat shops, but if a robot can make clothes, who needs China? Just build your own robot factory and throw some yarn at the damn thing. 2000000 jeans are poured out the next day. What will happen to those sweat shop workers? Well just look at what happened to the workers in the last industrial revolutions... it aint pretty, but at least it's temporary.

An industrial revolution should trigger a major uptick in education. Because people these days cannot depend on spinning wheels or become blacksmiths, they have to go all the way through high school to be useful in society. After the next industrial revolution you will have to have a university degree in order to be useful. If you have one now, congratulations, you are safe. If you don't your job might become obsolete.

The energy sector is currently our biggest problem. We still rely on fossil feuls. Our alternatives are not that great at the moment(except maybe for nuclear power). When we figure out how to make efficient batteries that are small we will be able to store unused power for later use.A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having. And an industrial revolution without massive amounts of energy to drive it is a non-event. Once we solve this problem we will be able to move on with our lives, and no longer worry about powering our world. In the future we will take electricity for granted because we will not even need to know it exists to use it. All our devices and machines will use power that they get from the air. That's a topic for another story however.

One of most difficult things to produce in the world is food. Cows run around mooing and pooing everywhere and eating all the grass... farting methane merrily along the way. If we can manufacture meat from stem cells we can industrialize farming! Imagine getting a steak that was grown in a meat factory. No animal cruelty there. Just some stem cells used to grow meat. The cool thing about cells is that if you give them the right chemicals they will replicate. So what you can have is chemical energy to create food. This means that food can be really cheap, disease free and produced from premium genetic stock.

The social revolution
The net result of all of the above is a social revolution. Smarter people make smarter choices, the world moves forward and we look back on ourselves in our previous state and think of it as primitive. I lived in the time where cellular phones did not exist. We got by, but you often had to ask someone  whether they would be home at a certain time because you wanted to phone them, you had to arrange to meet someone somewhere, and if there was some misunderstanding there was no way to correct it. Fun times. Once I forgot that my mother was not picking me up from school and waited one and a half hours for her to pick me up.

My grandparents still took 2 days to travel 80kms into town, because they did it in a horse cart. The wheels of revolution were already spinning up.

The pyramid of needs that I posted in a previous article will mean that more people will closer to the top than to the bottom. It can be truly great, but be prepared for the evil elements of this world to somehow find a way to make our lives miserable in this futuristic utopia.

Comments