Yeah, but parent is saying if you zoom out. We don't know what will come next; it could be dramatically different. Nobody saw industrialization and its attendant social order coming.
What I don't think Mr. Asimov could have imagined is the rise of the Oligarchs, dominated primarily by the heads of the banking industry, though also by the petrochemical and a few other top-tier industries. These individuals have increasingly distorted the free-market system and corrupted the political systems to satisfy their own narrow ends. They are financial protectionists. And because of them a great deal of innovation that could have been has been stymied. I would argue that if it were not for their depressing effects on society, Mr. Asimov's predictions would now look rather underwhelming by comparison, as we would have achieved far more than he predicted. Alas, given our current state of affairs, I do not think it possible for society to advanced very far beyond were it currently stands. And in a matter of decades we are likely to start moving backwards rather then forwards. On that mark, with his concerns on population growth, I believe Mr. Asimov hit it squarely on the head.
What I find fascinating about these predictions is that a lot of them came to pass around 1970 and then fell back. For example nationalisation of utilities and railways (here in the UK), communal living (tower blocks), and so on.
Not to mention "a great liberalism of mind and the freedom to say anything"....
I don't think it's off-base to say that this is an attack on the current state of society - the oft-repeated wail that capitalism and the opportunities it has brought (including technology) has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers. This is universally construed as a bad thing.
I have problems with this.
In order to decide that something is bad, we need to have an idea of what is good. Where does that come from here? The past? Your imagination? Do you 'miss' the olden days of constant strife, peril, religion that moulded those who survived into wise old men and women, their minds enriched by the fullness of life, but their bodies cold, wet, and illness-ridden from the lack of modern technology? Perhaps you miss the 'community' vibe of the 1950's. Or your own childhood. Or perhaps you dream of your own utopia. Am I close?
I hope the point made in the above paragraph is self evident, but in case it's not, ask yourself how many of your alternative realities you've actually experienced, and how many are just ideas you've accrued with the blanks liberally filled in by educated guesses and imaginations. Try and find one that isn't. Got one? Good.
Now let's plan. How would you - or anyone - transform the whole of society from what we have today to your new utopia? Plan it out. Perhaps government has to do something. Perhaps government has to go. You're almost certainly going to face dissent - perhaps some people need to face some hard realities for a short time, you know, in the transition period. Think like this for a while. I don't think it will be long before 1984 starts to take shape.
Let's categorise society. Let's construct a hypothetical index in our minds that tracks intelligence/education/income in a single number (the actual equation isn't relevant). Assume it's normally distributed[0]. Let's also assume that the kind of person who sympathises with the article in this link is in the top 25% (far right quarter), so put yourself up there. Let's consider the bottom 55% - the kind of people whose chief pleasures in our Brave New World may be TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc. - they're not massively intellectual.
Where exactly do these people (who I posit construct the majority of our actual society) fit in to your new utopia, assuming you managed the transition without creating 1984? Are they suddenly reading books, in a newfound passion for learning? Maybe they accept their place in their world, respectfully keeping quiet in reverence to their overlords, the intelligensia. Can you fit them in anywhere whilst maintaining the utopia?
This thought experiment should be difficult by this point. I say it's impossible.
If you are not in the bottom 55% of our hypothetical index, there is a great wealth of things out there to please you. Almost all activities are in reach of the average person now. You have books, the ability to travel, the internet, base jumping, mountaineering, arctic exploration, even space travel is expected to be affordable within most of our lifespans. You probably know this already, I guess you're probably happy enough with your own life and world. The discomfort you feel is with the rest of us 'out there', right?
Society is reflective of its components. People will seek to maximise happiness and pleasure under given constraints. This has always been and will always be so. It is the essence of humanity. The simple truth is that the industrial and technical revolutions of late have loosened those constraints by many orders of magnitude, and now instead of dog-fighting, back-room card games, duels, 24-hour boozing, or whatever it was the bottom 55% used to do 'back in the day', they have other things. Like you, they are who they are: a conflagration of nature/nurture forces that amount to a personality.
The difference is that instead of making use of all things available in the world to please you, you've chosen to spend your time sat on your high horse looking down on them, wishing they were different, so that the view from up there was a little nicer.
Hum, grumble mumble... We surely are at the end of a cycle in human development terms, witch means the actual society going to change in something new, BUT "Industrial Society" is not actually a society in humans terms.
We have had countless "industrial society" in various different societies, from Japanese steel, China ceramic and shipping (far in the past), metallurgic industry from Celts, Roman industry, cord and weapons industry in more recent times, ... surely "industry" as a concept have changed.
It's still a matter of work in certain location with a certain supply chain to produce a certain (big) amount of goods, in tech terms we have switched various times and now we are about to change from subtractive manufacturing (CNC mills) to additive ones (3D printing) etc such tech change ALSO change more or less the human society but there are still two separate things.
Actual economically-driven, neoliberal society yes completely fails to evolve, because real progress is against certain business, because managerial/profit driven development is incompatible with real innovation, that's an enormous issue of the present time, but again not an "industrial society" issue.
Transportation changes thanks to TLCs and tech evolution, climate change push will probably push us from roads to air/water ways, so a future without major roads and rails infra that demand stability and a certain concentration will probably vanish in a more mixed and flexible ones, the need of big factories will change reducing a bit with tech progress, how we live will change accordingly, but again that's not an industrial society end, nor the actual society end...
It's still probably too early to say when and how such changes happens if they'll happen. There are still too much variables in the game.
> If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.
This is an interesting idea: that the shedding of industry by an industrial society is irreversible. There is no way to go back, no matter how desperately that might be desired.
But the reason presented seems kind of flimsy. What does "mint preliminary social capital" mean and why is it impossible after industrialization is abandoned? The idea isn't explained before or after the statement.
The cherry on top is that it's all fueled even harder by the hyperindividualism that thrived on the second half of the 20th century onward. No sense of community or belonging to a social group, atomised individuals each acting on their own wants and needs, with no cohesive social force to impel a sense of duty to the collective.
Atomising society from the late 70s to today might end up being not only a major historical mistake but a catastrophic one.
Sure, it's the belief that the rulers can create a rational society through technical means, and it's been the dominant idea of the past century. And time after time, their pet theories of the day are undermined by the unintended consequences of meeting reality.
How come shortsighted thinking became so popular? Cut jobs, close factories for short term gain of the elites, but in the long term? There may be no one left to rule...
Well by Marx' predictions, this should already have happened. It throws a real spanner in the works for the theory that the evolution of a society is quite so inevitable and predictable.
But this comes back to my point. This is essentially putting faith in Asimov-style psychohistory.
Well, I think it’s clear that the prospect of deep lifestyle changes, specifically downgrades, will never prove very popular. Especially since upper class lifestyles are not likely to change nearly as much as working class.
But also, measures to control population strike deeply dystopian chords, and result in similarly adverse reactions.
I think most people realize things have long not been sustainable... but it isn’t obvious what to do about that. I think that’s why the focus has been on technology that can buy us more time. Anything else that could help is probably not gonna happen in short order...
Shelling out our industrial/manufacturing economy for a "services economy" + big government/welfare economy has ended the middle class; meanwhile the political class (and media) have consolidated into a front group for an increasingly hidden ruling class/aristocracy, who like the companies behind shell companies are pretty hard to identify and lampoon.
This of course would be an intriguing book to read should someone dare to write it.
This has happened many times before, and it will keep happening because humans do not (cannot?) change their fundamental nature. Even if society as we know it dies, it'll just get reborn like a cursed phoenix. Every doomsayer seems to forget that there is nothing new under the sun, and society has "fallen" and picked itself back up over and over and over again, but this time "it used to be better" and this time "society will really die, because it's different!" Of course it's different, but humans don't change.
> Just a couple decades ago, people dreamed of simpler lives. Plumbers, electricians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners.
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