WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.520 Well, welcome everyone to the penultimate session of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. 2 00:00:04.020 --> 00:00:08.560 My name's Robert Fitty and I teach English at Flinders University 3 00:00:08.560 --> 00:00:13.240 and I've been on the organising committee for this festival for the last few months 4 00:00:13.240 --> 00:00:17.480 and I must admit I am awfully grateful to you people for actually coming. 5 00:00:22.520 --> 00:00:26.500 It was a source of some anxiety to me on, say, Thursday night, 6 00:00:26.500 --> 00:00:32.160 but you throw a party for something intellectual in Adelaide and people come. 7 00:00:33.500 --> 00:00:37.960 Okay, today we're talking about new technologies and the workforce, 8 00:00:38.300 --> 00:00:39.960 who's feeding the hand that bites. 9 00:00:41.220 --> 00:00:44.240 In thinking about the idea of new technologies and the workforce, 10 00:00:44.440 --> 00:00:49.420 it occurred to me that people these days seem to talk about work and jobs 11 00:00:49.420 --> 00:00:52.560 in the same way they used to talk about sex and relationships. 12 00:00:53.360 --> 00:00:55.540 We define ourselves by our work. 13 00:00:55.640 --> 00:00:56.400 Is it fulfilling? 14 00:00:56.500 --> 00:01:00.020 Will our job be a long-term relationship? 15 00:01:00.680 --> 00:01:02.220 Do we deserve better? 16 00:01:02.620 --> 00:01:05.700 Should we think about taking a bit more work on the side? 17 00:01:07.420 --> 00:01:12.020 Work is the obsession of people my age and younger, it seems to be. 18 00:01:12.220 --> 00:01:18.140 And new technologies are often described as a panacea for all our social and economic ills. 19 00:01:18.380 --> 00:01:23.100 They're going to provide endless growth, pleasant and interesting jobs in the services sector, 20 00:01:23.380 --> 00:01:26.480 reduction of our reliance on wasteful and polluting jobs, 21 00:01:26.500 --> 00:01:26.680 and the 22 00:01:32.320 --> 00:01:32.920 ! 23 00:01:35.920 --> 00:01:42.580 I'm someone who works with computers, I guess, rather than working on computers, 24 00:01:42.580 --> 00:01:46.700 and we have this panel here today to answer some questions. 25 00:01:46.700 --> 00:01:49.880 We have Damian Broderick, Mark Cully, Mackenzie Walk. 26 00:01:49.880 --> 00:01:52.320 I'll introduce them individually as they come up to speak. 27 00:01:52.320 --> 00:01:56.560 They'll each speak for a few minutes and then we'll have question time. 28 00:01:56.880 --> 00:01:59.900 So the questions run something along these lines. 29 00:02:00.420 --> 00:02:03.480 Can the virtual world live up to the hype that surrounds it? 30 00:02:03.800 --> 00:02:07.860 Will things really be done differently and better in the new century? 31 00:02:08.260 --> 00:02:11.240 Will the process generate more jobs than it destroys? 32 00:02:11.680 --> 00:02:13.400 Will they be better jobs? 33 00:02:14.140 --> 00:02:19.140 And also, do computerized ways of doing things serve certain vested interests? 34 00:02:20.500 --> 00:02:22.300 Do they do so to the detriment of the future? 35 00:02:22.300 --> 00:02:29.240 Is there ever going to be enough activity in the virtual economy to provide work and 36 00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:34.780 identity for the millions of people who used to make a living working with their hands 37 00:02:34.780 --> 00:02:36.980 or in manufacturing of some form or another? 38 00:02:37.240 --> 00:02:40.340 And in whose interest is it to see that this happens? 39 00:02:40.880 --> 00:02:43.660 So those are the sorts of questions that I hope we'll address today. 40 00:02:43.960 --> 00:02:45.600 Our first speaker is Mark Cully. 41 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:50.760 He has recently returned to Adelaide to work at the National Center for Labor Studies at 42 00:02:50.760 --> 00:02:51.420 Flinders University. 43 00:02:52.300 --> 00:02:58.760 And he comes from work done on workplace relations and work reform with both the major and Blair 44 00:02:58.760 --> 00:03:00.220 governments in the UK. 45 00:03:00.920 --> 00:03:01.660 Thank you. 46 00:03:06.720 --> 00:03:08.220 Futurology is very much in vogue. 47 00:03:08.240 --> 00:03:10.720 I think it's something to do with premillennial fever. 48 00:03:11.280 --> 00:03:15.500 Some of you might have seen, for example, the Business Review Weekly has hired a couple 49 00:03:15.500 --> 00:03:19.820 of two hip young gunslingers who write this excreble column called Pop House. 50 00:03:20.040 --> 00:03:22.280 And what they do is they construct a survey. 51 00:03:22.300 --> 00:03:28.140 They invent a conversation. 52 00:03:28.340 --> 00:03:28.540 They invent a conversation. 53 00:03:28.540 --> 00:03:28.920 They invent a conversation. 54 00:03:29.540 --> 00:03:33.340 They invent a conversation. 55 00:03:33.880 --> 00:03:34.400 They invent a conversation. 56 00:03:34.400 --> 00:03:34.540 They invent a conversation. 57 00:03:34.540 --> 00:03:34.560 They invent a conversation. 58 00:03:34.560 --> 00:03:34.640 They invent a conversation. 59 00:03:34.640 --> 00:03:35.160 They invent a conversation. 60 00:03:35.160 --> 00:03:35.700 They invent a conversation. 61 00:03:35.700 --> 00:03:35.860 They invent a conversation. 62 00:03:35.860 --> 00:03:36.600 They invent a conversation. 63 00:03:36.600 --> 00:03:36.620 They invent a conversation. 64 00:03:36.620 --> 00:03:36.940 They invent a conversation. 65 00:03:36.940 --> 00:03:37.740 They invent a conversation. 66 00:03:37.740 --> 00:03:37.920 They invent a conversation. 67 00:03:38.320 --> 00:03:40.140 They invent a conversation. 68 00:03:40.140 --> 00:03:41.920 They invent a conversation. 69 00:03:42.620 --> 00:03:44.700 They invent a conversation. 70 00:03:44.920 --> 00:03:46.000 They invent a conversation. 71 00:03:46.140 --> 00:03:47.760 They invent a conversation. 72 00:03:48.460 --> 00:03:50.020 They invent a conversation. 73 00:03:50.020 --> 00:03:52.280 They invent a conversation. 74 00:03:52.280 --> 00:03:54.920 totally fed up with the incessant travel in their old jobs, 75 00:03:55.080 --> 00:03:58.680 the soul-destroying focus on the ever-increasing monthly budget targets 76 00:03:58.680 --> 00:04:01.580 and the declining time available for them to spend together. 77 00:04:01.920 --> 00:04:04.740 They knew they could never start a family in that kind of lifestyle. 78 00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:08.780 Arthur's last promotion in America and the geographic move that it involved 79 00:04:08.780 --> 00:04:10.800 had disconnected him from most of his old friends 80 00:04:10.800 --> 00:04:13.800 and the people in the upper-class neighbourhood where he and Jennifer 81 00:04:13.800 --> 00:04:17.620 were locked into life, making the establishment of new friendships difficult. 82 00:04:18.200 --> 00:04:20.840 Arthur knew he could do his job from almost anywhere in the world, 83 00:04:20.840 --> 00:04:24.400 so where did he go? He came to the worker's paradise, Australia. 84 00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:29.500 And a typical working day for Arthur. 85 00:04:29.620 --> 00:04:32.080 He gets out of bed at quarter to seven in the morning, 86 00:04:32.760 --> 00:04:35.440 showers, dresses and makes his school lunches for his two children. 87 00:04:35.540 --> 00:04:38.440 He liked doing this because it was a simple ritual of caring 88 00:04:38.440 --> 00:04:40.680 that was visible and tangible both to him and his children. 89 00:04:40.960 --> 00:04:44.560 He read the newspaper for 20 minutes, checked and answered his emails on his home computer 90 00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:47.740 and his electronic diary reminded him he had a team meeting today. 91 00:04:48.280 --> 00:04:50.740 Following the team meeting, two members of the team 92 00:04:50.740 --> 00:04:53.440 set up separate appointments with Arthur in order to discuss 93 00:04:53.440 --> 00:04:56.600 their individual work performance and to identify competency areas 94 00:04:56.600 --> 00:04:59.560 that they could be developing to the mutual benefit of themselves and the company. 95 00:05:00.880 --> 00:05:06.440 He got home at 3.30 in time to listen to his children talk about what had happened at school. 96 00:05:06.660 --> 00:05:08.620 They sometimes asked him to help him with their homework 97 00:05:08.620 --> 00:05:12.120 and he really enjoyed being available for this unpredictable quality time. 98 00:05:13.380 --> 00:05:17.520 After he and Jennifer had eaten their dinner, they would often muck around as a family 99 00:05:17.520 --> 00:05:19.380 until the children went to bed about 8.30. 100 00:05:20.080 --> 00:05:20.720 He and Jennifer were able to get together and talk about their work. 101 00:05:20.720 --> 00:05:22.880 He and Jennifer might then do some professional development reading. 102 00:05:28.340 --> 00:05:30.980 Or spend time in preparation for next day's work. 103 00:05:31.160 --> 00:05:33.400 They would usually take a walk together before going to bed. 104 00:05:33.660 --> 00:05:34.920 He liked this life. 105 00:05:35.500 --> 00:05:38.400 I mean, what an antiseptic vision of the future that is. 106 00:05:38.600 --> 00:05:39.520 I think I'd kill myself. 107 00:05:40.560 --> 00:05:43.480 It reminds me of those 1950s Doris Day movies. 108 00:05:45.180 --> 00:05:46.160 Here's another vision. 109 00:05:46.900 --> 00:05:49.460 In the future, we'll be broken up into different classes. 110 00:05:49.480 --> 00:05:50.540 We won't be working classes. 111 00:05:50.720 --> 00:05:51.320 We won't be working in the upper class anymore. 112 00:05:51.480 --> 00:05:52.600 But we're very similar to that. 113 00:05:52.700 --> 00:05:54.960 We have the alphas, who are the information elite. 114 00:05:55.080 --> 00:05:58.840 They're the people who are still doing all the serious work 115 00:05:58.840 --> 00:06:02.760 and includes the politicians and the journalists and what have you. 116 00:06:03.240 --> 00:06:04.600 We then have the beaters. 117 00:06:05.060 --> 00:06:06.520 They're the protective strata. 118 00:06:06.960 --> 00:06:09.440 They're the ones who rationalize the system and keep it going. 119 00:06:09.840 --> 00:06:13.360 Social workers, school teachers, police and security guards. 120 00:06:14.340 --> 00:06:16.840 Let me set aside the gammas for a moment because I'll come back to them. 121 00:06:16.900 --> 00:06:17.920 But we have the deltas. 122 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:20.560 And the deltas are the dissidents because every society, 123 00:06:20.720 --> 00:06:21.700 it's got to have its dissidents. 124 00:06:22.780 --> 00:06:25.960 Some will rebel from principles, some from pathology, some from both. 125 00:06:26.100 --> 00:06:29.900 The point is that their rebellion is functional as long as it doesn't get out of hand. 126 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:33.560 The deltas furnish work for the protective strata, the bettas. 127 00:06:34.200 --> 00:06:37.920 And they provide the tabloid type entertainment for the gammas. 128 00:06:38.380 --> 00:06:40.420 In an ever more boring, predictable world, 129 00:06:40.440 --> 00:06:43.820 crazies and criminals will provide the zest, the risk and the mystery. 130 00:06:44.100 --> 00:06:47.460 And the gammas are what Lee Kuan Yew calls the digits. 131 00:06:48.420 --> 00:06:50.320 That's the mass of us. 132 00:06:50.720 --> 00:06:53.440 And they don't work because there isn't any work left for them to do. 133 00:06:54.180 --> 00:06:56.060 They're managed by bread and circuses. 134 00:06:56.060 --> 00:06:58.560 The bread gets modest transfer payments from the state. 135 00:06:58.840 --> 00:07:04.940 And the circus is watching the entertainment that's provided by the bettas controlling the deltas. 136 00:07:06.420 --> 00:07:10.580 Okay, that's got a lot more humanity than the earlier version, but it's a dystopia. 137 00:07:10.920 --> 00:07:13.360 So we've had the end of history, according to some. 138 00:07:13.500 --> 00:07:17.440 And now, according to Jeremy Rifkin, we're looking at the end of work. 139 00:07:17.660 --> 00:07:20.700 Now, the demise of work has been predicted about as often as the end of work. 140 00:07:20.700 --> 00:07:24.640 As an argument, it has the merit of being a falsifiable hypothesis, 141 00:07:24.940 --> 00:07:27.580 at least where the proponent is brave enough to put a date on it. 142 00:07:28.220 --> 00:07:28.840 Keynes did. 143 00:07:28.980 --> 00:07:30.400 He said it would be 100 years. 144 00:07:30.620 --> 00:07:32.000 That was in 1936. 145 00:07:32.220 --> 00:07:36.680 He said the grandchildren of his generation would solve the economic problem of satisfying wants. 146 00:07:36.860 --> 00:07:37.980 But it hasn't happened yet. 147 00:07:38.200 --> 00:07:44.060 We may have 7% unemployment, but there are more Australians working now than ever before. 148 00:07:44.300 --> 00:07:50.440 And the volume of paid labor conducted in terms of total hours worked has gone up about half. 149 00:07:50.700 --> 00:07:51.780 In the past quarter century. 150 00:07:52.020 --> 00:07:54.700 And there are two reasons why work isn't diminishing over time. 151 00:07:55.060 --> 00:07:58.220 One is that our material wants keep expanding. 152 00:07:58.780 --> 00:08:01.920 We want those very sleek Nokia phones. 153 00:08:02.300 --> 00:08:05.840 And new technologies create new jobs while they destroy others. 154 00:08:06.340 --> 00:08:10.580 From the hand loom weavers onwards, we've been having the same battle. 155 00:08:10.820 --> 00:08:14.860 The good thing is that we've escaped what Marx called the idiocy of rural life. 156 00:08:15.360 --> 00:08:18.540 And the future holds out the prospect of escaping the drudgery of toil. 157 00:08:19.040 --> 00:08:20.680 Every farm worker in this country, 158 00:08:20.700 --> 00:08:22.900 now produces enough to feed at least 50 Australians. 159 00:08:23.140 --> 00:08:24.600 And that's ignoring what we export. 160 00:08:24.920 --> 00:08:28.920 And imagine a future in which we might be able to achieve the same efficiencies in manufacturing. 161 00:08:29.300 --> 00:08:31.300 We are well on the way to this. 162 00:08:31.480 --> 00:08:35.160 Only 1 in 12 Australians of working age are employed in manufacturing now. 163 00:08:35.620 --> 00:08:36.600 So what's the new economy? 164 00:08:36.740 --> 00:08:37.940 A range of labels have been applied. 165 00:08:38.140 --> 00:08:41.360 Post-industrial, post-Fordism, and the knowledge economy. 166 00:08:41.740 --> 00:08:47.960 You can't walk into an airport bookstore these days without seeing the knowledge economy emblazoned all over the non-fiction shelves. 167 00:08:48.340 --> 00:08:50.400 I think it's a fairly meaningless concept. 168 00:08:50.700 --> 00:08:55.700 The best label that I've heard put forward, which is by an LSE economist called Danny Quah, 169 00:08:55.840 --> 00:08:57.240 is the weightless economy. 170 00:08:57.880 --> 00:09:02.760 The weightless economy produces products and services that can be reduced to strings of ones and zeros. 171 00:09:02.880 --> 00:09:07.000 Things like CDs, advertising, research, education, banking. 172 00:09:07.640 --> 00:09:11.740 Post-modernists have talked about the fragmentation and condensing of time and space. 173 00:09:11.940 --> 00:09:15.860 And what they've perhaps rarely discussed is a collapse of matter itself. 174 00:09:16.100 --> 00:09:20.300 A large and growing proportion of the things that we produce now 175 00:09:20.300 --> 00:09:23.980 that are of value are, or have the potential to be, weightless. 176 00:09:24.280 --> 00:09:28.420 We've now really reached the stage where we can say that all that is solid melts into air. 177 00:09:28.760 --> 00:09:33.080 In the earlier session I gave today I talked about some of the contemporary consequences of this. 178 00:09:33.280 --> 00:09:38.680 And that is we're producing a labour market that is becoming like an hourglass in its shape. 179 00:09:39.100 --> 00:09:41.660 It's still a long way from an hourglass, but it's becoming like that. 180 00:09:41.760 --> 00:09:46.260 It's increasing polarisation in the types of jobs that are being created between the high-skilled and the unskilled. 181 00:09:46.700 --> 00:09:47.680 Widening income inequality. 182 00:09:48.120 --> 00:09:50.120 And a widening distribution of hours worked. 183 00:09:50.200 --> 00:09:50.280 And that's what we're doing. 184 00:09:50.280 --> 00:09:53.780 But the main change that has occurred is that labour has become more commodified. 185 00:09:54.060 --> 00:09:58.700 The ability to produce weightless goods and services anytime, anywhere, anyhow 186 00:09:59.380 --> 00:10:02.960 appears to have dramatically lowered the transaction costs in writing contracts. 187 00:10:03.200 --> 00:10:05.860 And therefore the costs involved in hiring and firing labour. 188 00:10:06.440 --> 00:10:11.020 The increasing volume of labour that is performed for services instead of service 189 00:10:11.020 --> 00:10:13.540 is the most significant trend in the labour market at the moment. 190 00:10:14.320 --> 00:10:18.100 Lord Wedderburn once said that the common law tests for identifying an employee 191 00:10:18.100 --> 00:10:20.260 was rather like identifying an elephant. 192 00:10:20.900 --> 00:10:24.900 Too hard to describe, but you plainly knew one when you saw it thundering towards you. 193 00:10:26.260 --> 00:10:30.580 It's much less plain these days, in part because employers have sought to take advantage 194 00:10:30.580 --> 00:10:33.880 of the ambiguous legal status of many forms of contingent labour. 195 00:10:34.140 --> 00:10:35.720 And I think we're all familiar with the list. 196 00:10:35.880 --> 00:10:37.920 Fixed term contracts. I'm on one. 197 00:10:38.200 --> 00:10:40.420 Freelance workers. Own account workers. 198 00:10:40.680 --> 00:10:42.400 People that are self-employed without employees. 199 00:10:42.860 --> 00:10:45.100 Casual workers and temporary agency workers. 200 00:10:45.500 --> 00:10:47.040 Let's just take the last of these. 201 00:10:47.540 --> 00:10:50.000 McKenzie in his book says that he was surprised to read 202 00:10:50.000 --> 00:10:50.260 they didn't have a contract. 203 00:10:50.260 --> 00:10:53.640 But he says that in Australia McDonald's employs more people than the entire steel industry. 204 00:10:53.940 --> 00:10:55.620 Well here's a new one for you, McKenzie. 205 00:10:56.500 --> 00:11:02.160 Manpower is now, probably outside the Chinese army, the largest employer in the world. 206 00:11:02.500 --> 00:11:04.520 600,000 people on its books in the US. 207 00:11:04.680 --> 00:11:06.800 150,000 on its books in the UK. 208 00:11:07.580 --> 00:11:08.300 And counting. 209 00:11:08.580 --> 00:11:10.700 And it's not in any traditional sense an employer. 210 00:11:10.840 --> 00:11:11.920 It's a virtual employer. 211 00:11:13.820 --> 00:11:19.000 And as I did for the best part of four years, you come out of the rabbit warren 212 00:11:19.000 --> 00:11:21.740 that's Charing Cross tube station every morning, 213 00:11:21.860 --> 00:11:23.200 you're surrounded by these people 214 00:11:23.200 --> 00:11:25.240 who are handing you these free papers, 215 00:11:25.920 --> 00:11:27.680 these workers on zero-hour contracts, 216 00:11:28.500 --> 00:11:29.600 pressing on your free papers, 217 00:11:29.640 --> 00:11:30.940 offering you some sort of temping work. 218 00:11:31.160 --> 00:11:33.340 And it isn't just Aussies abroad who are taking these jobs. 219 00:11:33.580 --> 00:11:35.680 Lots of people in the UK are taking these new jobs up. 220 00:11:35.760 --> 00:11:36.960 And they're not just for secretaries. 221 00:11:37.080 --> 00:11:38.640 They're for things like teachers, lawyers, 222 00:11:38.720 --> 00:11:40.280 accountants and IT specialists. 223 00:11:42.460 --> 00:11:44.540 Work that I commissioned while I was in the UK 224 00:11:44.540 --> 00:11:46.020 suggested that the employment status 225 00:11:46.020 --> 00:11:47.920 of one in four workers was open to question. 226 00:11:47.920 --> 00:11:50.560 And when you have a safety net employment protection system 227 00:11:50.560 --> 00:11:52.300 that's predicated on you being an employee, 228 00:11:52.940 --> 00:11:55.640 if you're one of those one in four people, 229 00:11:55.720 --> 00:11:56.920 then you've got potential problems. 230 00:11:58.000 --> 00:12:00.660 So to return to a theme that I raised in my earlier session, 231 00:12:00.800 --> 00:12:02.480 how do we moderate risk and share prosperity? 232 00:12:02.920 --> 00:12:04.400 And traditionally, what we used to do 233 00:12:04.400 --> 00:12:06.800 is we used to rely on unions and awards to do this for us. 234 00:12:07.360 --> 00:12:08.780 The collapse in union membership 235 00:12:08.780 --> 00:12:10.280 from half to a third of the workforce 236 00:12:10.280 --> 00:12:13.220 in the space of just over a decade is fairly well known. 237 00:12:13.580 --> 00:12:15.460 And the award system is well on its way 238 00:12:15.460 --> 00:12:16.360 to being dead and buried 239 00:12:16.360 --> 00:12:17.820 and probably doesn't, 240 00:12:17.920 --> 00:12:19.580 but it's not going to cover temporary workers anyhow. 241 00:12:20.380 --> 00:12:22.700 There are lots of arguments as to what's caused this, 242 00:12:22.800 --> 00:12:24.000 which I'm not going to go into, 243 00:12:24.480 --> 00:12:27.560 except to say, to talk about a new form of unionism, 244 00:12:27.680 --> 00:12:30.380 which is about way that unions might adapt 245 00:12:30.380 --> 00:12:31.180 if they're to stay relevant. 246 00:12:31.520 --> 00:12:33.740 The most interesting form is this new form 247 00:12:33.740 --> 00:12:34.780 called an employee mutual, 248 00:12:35.580 --> 00:12:37.060 which engages with the new economy, 249 00:12:37.180 --> 00:12:39.020 the weightless economy and its labour market 250 00:12:39.020 --> 00:12:39.940 on its own terms. 251 00:12:40.080 --> 00:12:42.300 Specifically, the employee mutual acts 252 00:12:42.300 --> 00:12:45.340 as a labour hire company in the same manner as manpower. 253 00:12:45.480 --> 00:12:47.060 Its aim is to provide employment, 254 00:12:47.060 --> 00:12:49.120 rather than job security for members. 255 00:12:49.360 --> 00:12:51.320 And it would include benefits like sick leave, 256 00:12:51.500 --> 00:12:53.500 paid leave and superannuation contributions. 257 00:12:54.160 --> 00:12:55.700 But in theory, it does a lot more than that. 258 00:12:55.780 --> 00:12:58.540 It could in effect function much like a craft guild of old 259 00:12:58.540 --> 00:13:01.680 by providing training and occupational career ladders 260 00:13:01.680 --> 00:13:03.520 and childcare for its members. 261 00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:08.060 And this is not, I don't deal in pie in the sky ideas. 262 00:13:09.460 --> 00:13:12.060 In California, the local branch of the AFL-CIO 263 00:13:12.860 --> 00:13:15.000 has organised a collectively owned employment agency 264 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:16.120 called Together at Work. 265 00:13:17.060 --> 00:13:19.180 Which supplies clerical workers to IT companies 266 00:13:19.180 --> 00:13:20.060 in Silicon Valley. 267 00:13:20.240 --> 00:13:22.860 And it's an interesting experiment to keep on touch on. 268 00:13:23.080 --> 00:13:24.880 But even if something like this came about, 269 00:13:24.980 --> 00:13:27.340 the Rifkin thesis of diminishing volume of work 270 00:13:27.340 --> 00:13:28.180 might be proved right. 271 00:13:28.440 --> 00:13:30.500 In my view, at least in the medium term, 272 00:13:30.560 --> 00:13:31.420 I can't see it happening. 273 00:13:31.720 --> 00:13:34.260 The decline in employment in agriculture and manufacturing 274 00:13:35.120 --> 00:13:37.360 is down to the remarkable ability of capitalism 275 00:13:37.360 --> 00:13:39.640 to ruthlessly pursue cost advantages 276 00:13:39.640 --> 00:13:40.980 in labour intensive industries. 277 00:13:41.320 --> 00:13:44.680 It isn't clear to me which types of labour intensive work 278 00:13:44.680 --> 00:13:46.640 in the weightless economy easily lend themselves 279 00:13:46.640 --> 00:13:48.520 to being depersonalised or automated. 280 00:13:49.100 --> 00:13:51.940 Would we really want hairdressers or chefs or journalists, 281 00:13:52.300 --> 00:13:54.900 I don't know, maybe journalists, to be automatons? 282 00:13:56.020 --> 00:13:58.300 Also, once all you baby boomers out there 283 00:13:58.300 --> 00:14:00.060 finally shuffle off this mortal coil, 284 00:14:00.440 --> 00:14:02.640 the demographics start to look a whole lot better 285 00:14:02.640 --> 00:14:04.680 for people like my age. 286 00:14:06.240 --> 00:14:07.300 I might be wrong. 287 00:14:07.440 --> 00:14:09.920 And if I am, then we do have some serious thinking ahead. 288 00:14:10.180 --> 00:14:12.620 And so I'm just gonna end up by talking about 289 00:14:12.620 --> 00:14:15.440 four types of proposals about what we can practically do. 290 00:14:18.420 --> 00:14:22.360 The first is the shortening of working hours. 291 00:14:22.780 --> 00:14:25.220 These can have mixed effects depending on how it's done. 292 00:14:25.460 --> 00:14:26.660 Cutting the standard working week 293 00:14:26.660 --> 00:14:28.440 can simply lead to more overtime being worked. 294 00:14:29.100 --> 00:14:31.740 On the other hand, permanent part-time working, job sharing, 295 00:14:31.920 --> 00:14:35.300 trading off future wage rises, not current wage payments, 296 00:14:35.400 --> 00:14:37.060 but future wage rises for more days off, 297 00:14:37.120 --> 00:14:39.120 are all feasible and are becoming more widespread. 298 00:14:40.020 --> 00:14:41.720 Secondly, are negative income taxes 299 00:14:41.720 --> 00:14:43.060 or earned income tax credits, 300 00:14:43.240 --> 00:14:45.480 which top up earnings to some socially agreed minimum 301 00:14:45.480 --> 00:14:46.620 if the market is not as good as it used to be. 302 00:14:46.620 --> 00:14:48.620 And the market determines that the paid wage is below this. 303 00:14:48.960 --> 00:14:51.300 In extreme versions, that involves an abolition 304 00:14:51.300 --> 00:14:52.800 of any sort of minimum wage. 305 00:14:53.160 --> 00:14:55.960 And in effect, we all pay to sustain inefficient forms 306 00:14:55.960 --> 00:14:57.260 of employment that we want to preserve. 307 00:14:57.560 --> 00:14:59.840 And this is actually pretty much the basis, 308 00:14:59.960 --> 00:15:03.160 the rationale for how the common agricultural policy 309 00:15:03.160 --> 00:15:04.040 operates in Europe. 310 00:15:04.500 --> 00:15:07.760 It preserves a way of life, French wine making, for example, 311 00:15:07.920 --> 00:15:09.080 which otherwise might not survive. 312 00:15:09.420 --> 00:15:10.960 And we all get some benefits from it. 313 00:15:11.020 --> 00:15:12.980 Certainly if you drive through the French countryside, you do. 314 00:15:14.100 --> 00:15:16.220 Third type of scheme is for the government to act 315 00:15:16.220 --> 00:15:17.540 as an employer of the last resort, 316 00:15:17.700 --> 00:15:20.060 giving employment to anyone who couldn't otherwise get a job 317 00:15:20.060 --> 00:15:22.720 and deploying them on activities useful to the community. 318 00:15:23.260 --> 00:15:24.920 This isn't very far apart again. 319 00:15:25.380 --> 00:15:26.740 I mean, the whole point about these is we're getting 320 00:15:26.740 --> 00:15:27.680 some left-right convergence. 321 00:15:28.140 --> 00:15:30.360 This isn't very far apart from work for the dole, 322 00:15:30.460 --> 00:15:32.780 which we're actually not supposed to call a job creation scheme, 323 00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:33.660 but it is. 324 00:15:34.480 --> 00:15:37.540 Finally, are schemes which pay all citizens of a mature age 325 00:15:37.540 --> 00:15:40.280 a basic income, irrespective of employment activity or means. 326 00:15:40.500 --> 00:15:42.420 These schemes would involve a complete rewrite, 327 00:15:42.620 --> 00:15:44.320 and we need to understand that, of a system of tax 328 00:15:44.320 --> 00:15:45.580 and social security transfer. 329 00:15:46.220 --> 00:15:48.340 The most imaginative of those which gives everyone 330 00:15:48.340 --> 00:15:50.880 some dividend-yielding asset base, like treasury bonds, 331 00:15:51.300 --> 00:15:53.100 which revert to the national pool on death. 332 00:15:54.060 --> 00:15:56.880 The real merit of this idea, compared with others, 333 00:15:56.940 --> 00:15:58.780 is it doesn't tarnish those who aren't good enough 334 00:15:58.780 --> 00:16:00.540 or lucky enough to get jobs in the future. 335 00:16:00.660 --> 00:16:02.660 In other words, it blames the system, not the victim. 336 00:16:02.800 --> 00:16:05.200 That still leaves us in the end with the issue, 337 00:16:05.260 --> 00:16:07.680 which I haven't resolved, of how we avoid becoming gammas, 338 00:16:07.720 --> 00:16:10.940 where the idleness will become as Bernard Russell wanted it 339 00:16:10.940 --> 00:16:11.820 to be, a noble pursuit. 340 00:16:12.280 --> 00:16:12.840 Thank you. 341 00:16:18.980 --> 00:16:20.680 Thank you very much, Mark. 342 00:16:22.200 --> 00:16:24.000 Our next speaker will be Mackenzie Walk. 343 00:16:24.260 --> 00:16:27.140 He teaches media studies at Macquarie University 344 00:16:27.140 --> 00:16:28.020 and annoys people. 345 00:16:28.780 --> 00:16:31.260 I think that would be your favourite hobby, wouldn't it? 346 00:16:32.220 --> 00:16:32.980 Fair enough. 347 00:16:33.400 --> 00:16:36.240 What I like about Mackenzie's writing and speaking 348 00:16:36.240 --> 00:16:38.460 is that he does essays rather than treatises. 349 00:16:38.700 --> 00:16:40.540 He tries ideas on, plays with them, 350 00:16:40.620 --> 00:16:42.260 so that we can see what happens. 351 00:16:42.720 --> 00:16:44.620 He lives and works in cyberspace. 352 00:16:45.380 --> 00:16:46.140 I don't. 353 00:16:46.140 --> 00:16:46.760 I don't know about works. 354 00:16:47.420 --> 00:16:49.280 Work implies doing something useful. 355 00:16:49.520 --> 00:16:50.440 I don't know about that. 356 00:16:51.400 --> 00:16:53.380 As we're about to leave the 20th century, 357 00:16:53.480 --> 00:16:56.240 I would have hoped that the possibility of abolishing work 358 00:16:56.240 --> 00:16:57.680 might now actually be on the agenda. 359 00:16:57.920 --> 00:17:00.340 But sadly, in a lot of ways, things seem to have gotten worse. 360 00:17:00.800 --> 00:17:03.640 I'm not talking about the dream that somehow work 361 00:17:03.640 --> 00:17:05.260 would just automatically be abolished 362 00:17:05.260 --> 00:17:06.500 by the progress of technology. 363 00:17:06.960 --> 00:17:10.080 I mean that the political struggle to abolish work 364 00:17:10.080 --> 00:17:12.560 seems to be something that has fallen off the agenda. 365 00:17:13.100 --> 00:17:15.540 Because it seems to me that the abolition of work, 366 00:17:15.540 --> 00:17:17.980 or the abolition of the tyranny of work, 367 00:17:18.020 --> 00:17:20.640 is very much like the abolition of political tyranny. 368 00:17:20.700 --> 00:17:22.300 It's something you have to actually struggle for. 369 00:17:22.380 --> 00:17:23.280 We're not given our freedom. 370 00:17:23.840 --> 00:17:25.300 It's something that you have to take. 371 00:17:25.620 --> 00:17:27.540 And it seems to me that work is tyranny over time, 372 00:17:27.760 --> 00:17:30.640 just as the government of Slobodan Milosevic 373 00:17:30.640 --> 00:17:32.220 is tyranny over space. 374 00:17:33.380 --> 00:17:35.500 Do we work to live, or do we live to work? 375 00:17:35.740 --> 00:17:36.980 Unfortunately, it seems increasingly 376 00:17:36.980 --> 00:17:39.100 that we are supposed to live in order to work. 377 00:17:39.220 --> 00:17:42.080 The world has become one giant social factory. 378 00:17:42.920 --> 00:17:45.020 Capitalism is unique in the way that it divides time 379 00:17:45.020 --> 00:17:46.520 into work and recreation. 380 00:17:47.080 --> 00:17:49.400 It was the dream of the labour movement once upon a time 381 00:17:49.400 --> 00:17:51.200 to gradually decrease working time 382 00:17:51.200 --> 00:17:52.700 and increase leisure time. 383 00:17:52.940 --> 00:17:55.300 The eight hour day was supposed to be just a start. 384 00:17:56.100 --> 00:17:58.200 The most radical expression of this trend, however, 385 00:17:58.360 --> 00:17:59.900 were people like the Situationists, 386 00:17:59.900 --> 00:18:01.600 who called for the complete abolition of work. 387 00:18:01.760 --> 00:18:02.840 I mean, they weren't sort of content 388 00:18:02.840 --> 00:18:05.280 with the sort of retinuous goal of just chipping away at it. 389 00:18:05.360 --> 00:18:06.560 They wanted to do away with it. 390 00:18:07.160 --> 00:18:08.520 Now that might sound like a dream, 391 00:18:08.640 --> 00:18:10.920 but compared to the nightmare that is approaching, 392 00:18:11.640 --> 00:18:14.800 surely it's at least a kinder, gentler idea. 393 00:18:14.800 --> 00:18:17.600 Because I think what we're facing is the abolition of leisure. 394 00:18:18.220 --> 00:18:20.820 Every waking hour, indeed even one's sleep, 395 00:18:20.960 --> 00:18:23.520 is supposed to be productive now, is supposed to be useful. 396 00:18:23.880 --> 00:18:25.880 Of course, many intelligent people now realise 397 00:18:25.880 --> 00:18:27.720 that one's whole life can go by, 398 00:18:27.920 --> 00:18:30.840 and some organisational company has got the better part of it. 399 00:18:31.420 --> 00:18:34.480 A noticeable trend is the refusal of the Faustian compact 400 00:18:34.480 --> 00:18:36.400 with organised and institutional work. 401 00:18:36.640 --> 00:18:38.660 Some people would rather work for less, 402 00:18:38.660 --> 00:18:39.880 but work in their own terms. 403 00:18:40.280 --> 00:18:42.580 They fire up the laptop from their hobby farms 404 00:18:42.580 --> 00:18:44.660 and send some data down the wire with an invoice, 405 00:18:44.660 --> 00:18:46.280 and then go back to feeding the chooks. 406 00:18:46.960 --> 00:18:50.660 As a consequence, organised work has to offer larger and larger bribes 407 00:18:50.660 --> 00:18:53.340 to attract intelligent people into the world of total work. 408 00:18:53.840 --> 00:18:57.180 There's a magazine company across the street from me in Sydney, 409 00:18:57.260 --> 00:19:01.680 and inside the company there is a gymnasium and a cafe, 410 00:19:01.780 --> 00:19:03.340 and you can even get back rubs. 411 00:19:03.680 --> 00:19:06.320 And the whole place is wonderfully appointed and decorated. 412 00:19:06.740 --> 00:19:10.400 You know, it could have that famous Mel Brooks slogan, 413 00:19:10.620 --> 00:19:12.880 you know, our toilets are nicer than most people's homes. 414 00:19:14.660 --> 00:19:18.320 And of course the whole set of offices of this magazine company 415 00:19:18.320 --> 00:19:20.340 are a fantastic illusion of life. 416 00:19:20.960 --> 00:19:23.520 Now of course not everyone has the option of creating a relation 417 00:19:23.520 --> 00:19:24.720 to work on their own terms. 418 00:19:24.880 --> 00:19:28.140 For most people, working for someone else is still a regrettable necessity. 419 00:19:28.680 --> 00:19:31.740 The kinds of work that need to be done have probably not changed 420 00:19:32.280 --> 00:19:33.600 much in some centuries, 421 00:19:33.880 --> 00:19:35.680 but it seems to me their spatial distribution 422 00:19:36.300 --> 00:19:38.440 and the proportions between them have changed. 423 00:19:38.860 --> 00:19:41.180 There used to be a lot of factories here in Adelaide, 424 00:19:41.200 --> 00:19:43.560 and now those factories are probably in Mexico or the Philippines, 425 00:19:43.700 --> 00:19:44.640 but there are still factories here in the Philippines, and now those factories are probably in Mexico or the Philippines, 426 00:19:44.640 --> 00:19:45.920 but there are still factories here in the Philippines, 427 00:19:45.920 --> 00:19:46.020 and now those factories are probably in Mexico or the Philippines, 428 00:19:46.020 --> 00:19:47.760 and the information economy is not universal. 429 00:19:48.740 --> 00:19:52.400 There may be a concentration of computer programmers in Bombay, for example, 430 00:19:52.520 --> 00:19:54.400 now servicing a world market, 431 00:19:54.560 --> 00:19:57.820 but there's still a concentration of textile factories in southern China. 432 00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:02.100 It was once the case that primary, secondary and tertiary industries 433 00:20:02.100 --> 00:20:04.200 all took place in spatially connected ways. 434 00:20:04.960 --> 00:20:09.160 I mean, a small example, I live near the old Sydney Morning Herald building in Sydney, 435 00:20:09.300 --> 00:20:12.280 where the journalists and printers once shared the same building. 436 00:20:12.560 --> 00:20:13.440 SOCOG's there now. 437 00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:16.180 Yeah, just make up your own joke about that, I think. 438 00:20:17.900 --> 00:20:21.240 The point now is that the factory part where the printers are 439 00:20:21.240 --> 00:20:23.020 is actually way out in the western suburbs, 440 00:20:23.140 --> 00:20:26.440 and the journalists all have a nicely appointed office building in the city, 441 00:20:26.520 --> 00:20:30.340 and of course it's possible to communicate efficiently across that kind of spatial divide 442 00:20:30.340 --> 00:20:33.900 in a way that wasn't the case when the building was originally built. 443 00:20:35.240 --> 00:20:39.180 Now, Australia's actually done surprisingly well in the 80s and 90s in generating jobs, 444 00:20:39.400 --> 00:20:41.700 and it's the side of what's happening in employment 445 00:20:41.700 --> 00:20:43.300 that gets the least amount of attention. 446 00:20:43.440 --> 00:20:45.200 Unless you happen to be speaking to Paul Keating, 447 00:20:45.280 --> 00:20:46.900 who'll sort of bang on about this at great length. 448 00:20:47.720 --> 00:20:50.000 And we tend to overlook this and concentrate on unemployment, 449 00:20:50.100 --> 00:20:53.160 but the 80s and 90s were also a time of incredible growth in employment, 450 00:20:53.660 --> 00:20:56.160 and with a lot more women entering or returning to the workforce, 451 00:20:56.500 --> 00:20:59.840 that job growth has not kept pace with the demand for work, 452 00:20:59.940 --> 00:21:02.560 and let me not be heard as saying that that was a bad thing. 453 00:21:02.600 --> 00:21:03.800 If people want to work, good luck to them. 454 00:21:04.040 --> 00:21:07.220 But if you have people who formerly did not work return to the workforce, 455 00:21:07.440 --> 00:21:10.520 then where are you going to create a larger pool of jobs? 456 00:21:10.540 --> 00:21:11.820 So the issue, in a sense, changes. 457 00:21:11.820 --> 00:21:14.120 The kinds of work have also changed. 458 00:21:14.480 --> 00:21:16.160 Along the Eastern Seaboard in particular, 459 00:21:16.940 --> 00:21:18.700 and I'll come back to this later, 460 00:21:18.780 --> 00:21:21.020 what I'll insist on calling the information economy is booming 461 00:21:21.020 --> 00:21:22.800 and creating a great deal of new work. 462 00:21:23.400 --> 00:21:27.120 Those information industry jobs in turn create service industry jobs, 463 00:21:27.300 --> 00:21:30.480 since the information industry tends to demand of many of its employees 464 00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:32.720 that they commit themselves to total work. 465 00:21:33.220 --> 00:21:36.500 So you have educated people working, slaving, day and night, 466 00:21:37.180 --> 00:21:40.580 and a whole lot of less educated people who feed them and clean for them 467 00:21:40.580 --> 00:21:41.800 and take their dogs for a walk. 468 00:21:41.820 --> 00:21:46.780 And you then also get that tendency of people where both partners in the household 469 00:21:46.780 --> 00:21:48.540 are working, and working a lot, 470 00:21:48.700 --> 00:21:52.380 but then you're also generating whole families who not only do not have work, 471 00:21:52.420 --> 00:21:54.160 have not had work for two or three generations. 472 00:21:54.860 --> 00:21:56.860 So access to work becomes polarised. 473 00:21:58.020 --> 00:22:01.300 Now the part of Sydney that I live in actually pretty much has full employment. 474 00:22:01.980 --> 00:22:04.180 That's because the information industry creates jobs, 475 00:22:04.260 --> 00:22:05.960 which in turn create service industry jobs. 476 00:22:07.080 --> 00:22:10.600 Everybody in the video store near me actually lives, you know, miles away, 477 00:22:10.680 --> 00:22:11.800 and they're commuting into the city, 478 00:22:11.820 --> 00:22:13.460 to do these service industry jobs, 479 00:22:13.680 --> 00:22:17.420 to sort of service all of the information economy people such as myself, 480 00:22:17.640 --> 00:22:18.940 who are living in that particular suburb. 481 00:22:19.400 --> 00:22:22.320 But in a way, that is a very spatially restricted kind of phenomena. 482 00:22:22.720 --> 00:22:26.280 In Western Sydney, and indeed in many parts of Adelaide or Perth, 483 00:22:26.300 --> 00:22:27.840 not to mention the other regional centres, 484 00:22:28.400 --> 00:22:29.840 manufacturing jobs are going, 485 00:22:29.860 --> 00:22:32.680 and information industry jobs are not taking their place. 486 00:22:32.800 --> 00:22:36.420 And so there aren't... there isn't service industry job growth either. 487 00:22:36.540 --> 00:22:38.660 There isn't the income in the community to start that. 488 00:22:39.240 --> 00:22:41.280 The problem of job creation is, in short, 489 00:22:41.280 --> 00:22:44.600 a very geographically specific one, as Bob Gregory has argued. 490 00:22:44.960 --> 00:22:47.500 In some ways, the best predictor of people's employment prospects 491 00:22:47.500 --> 00:22:49.880 isn't necessarily age or gender, it's postcodes. 492 00:22:50.340 --> 00:22:54.240 And that may be why macroeconomic policies of employment 493 00:22:54.240 --> 00:22:56.340 may be missing the mark. 494 00:22:56.520 --> 00:22:59.440 We would have to look at much more spatially specific ways of addressing 495 00:23:00.280 --> 00:23:03.260 how it is that you kick-start employment in regions 496 00:23:03.260 --> 00:23:05.020 where unemployment is concentrated. 497 00:23:06.020 --> 00:23:07.680 Now, the income that work earns 498 00:23:07.680 --> 00:23:09.280 seems to be becoming more and more differentiated. 499 00:23:09.980 --> 00:23:11.260 It was the topic of another panel discussion. 500 00:23:11.280 --> 00:23:14.260 I think that's inevitable as the market becomes more and more global. 501 00:23:14.460 --> 00:23:16.760 And I think income differentials actually need to be measured 502 00:23:17.280 --> 00:23:18.780 relative to the size of the marketplace 503 00:23:18.780 --> 00:23:20.640 which is producing those differentials. 504 00:23:20.840 --> 00:23:23.440 And on that measure, I wonder if it actually is the case 505 00:23:23.440 --> 00:23:25.220 that the income gap is widening, 506 00:23:25.240 --> 00:23:27.560 because the usual measures we're given are absolute ones. 507 00:23:27.780 --> 00:23:29.400 They don't seem to me to take into account 508 00:23:29.400 --> 00:23:32.700 the larger size of the marketplace within which that occurs. 509 00:23:33.120 --> 00:23:36.280 I wonder if some of the differentials may be short-term too. 510 00:23:36.520 --> 00:23:39.360 The shortage of well-educated English-speaking people 511 00:23:39.360 --> 00:23:40.620 for certain kinds of jobs, 512 00:23:40.620 --> 00:23:41.440 and the information economy, 513 00:23:41.760 --> 00:23:43.760 may to some extent only be temporary, 514 00:23:43.980 --> 00:23:46.280 particularly considering the enormous growth of education 515 00:23:46.280 --> 00:23:48.860 in Australia's Asian neighbour countries. 516 00:23:49.240 --> 00:23:51.580 It may turn out to have been incredibly short-sighted 517 00:23:51.580 --> 00:23:54.300 to sell education internationally at kind of rock-bottom prices 518 00:23:54.300 --> 00:23:55.700 in the 80s and 90s, 519 00:23:55.700 --> 00:23:57.500 in a sense only to enhance our competitors, 520 00:23:57.720 --> 00:24:00.040 particularly given the shamefully low levels of investment 521 00:24:00.040 --> 00:24:01.820 the present government makes in education. 522 00:24:02.940 --> 00:24:06.140 Wealth is based on property, both private and public. 523 00:24:06.540 --> 00:24:08.160 Agriculture and manufacturing grow 524 00:24:08.160 --> 00:24:10.480 when there is the right mix of private property, 525 00:24:10.620 --> 00:24:13.540 and public property contribution to the creation of wealth. 526 00:24:13.800 --> 00:24:15.460 Take agriculture as an example. 527 00:24:15.580 --> 00:24:18.260 It seems to me the public property investment in that 528 00:24:18.260 --> 00:24:22.080 is in things like the road and the rail and the silos and so on. 529 00:24:23.120 --> 00:24:24.620 But I don't think we've thought enough 530 00:24:25.160 --> 00:24:27.480 about the relation between public and private property 531 00:24:27.480 --> 00:24:28.660 in the information economy. 532 00:24:29.400 --> 00:24:32.020 The privatisation of information does not always lead 533 00:24:32.020 --> 00:24:34.760 to the most efficient or effective allocation of resources. 534 00:24:35.820 --> 00:24:40.480 For example, giving education to people solely on their ability to pay, 535 00:24:40.480 --> 00:24:43.860 seems to me to be a somewhat grotesque way of allocating resources. 536 00:24:44.660 --> 00:24:47.440 Surely the ability to actually benefit from that education, 537 00:24:47.620 --> 00:24:48.980 which is something we can measure pretty well, 538 00:24:49.160 --> 00:24:51.060 is a better way to allocate it. 539 00:24:51.500 --> 00:24:53.520 Because it seems to me the more we go down that path 540 00:24:53.520 --> 00:24:56.020 of education based on the ability to pay, 541 00:24:56.140 --> 00:24:57.940 one creates an information aristocracy. 542 00:24:58.200 --> 00:25:01.340 The people who have income can afford to get their kids educated, 543 00:25:01.460 --> 00:25:04.000 and they're the people who will then get the jobs 544 00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:04.880 that generate the income. 545 00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:07.200 That in turn, you know, so you get a self-perpetuating 546 00:25:08.180 --> 00:25:10.460 information aristocracy of inherited class-based 547 00:25:10.480 --> 00:25:13.100 privilege, which does not necessarily make the best use 548 00:25:13.100 --> 00:25:15.700 of the intellectual resources in the community, 549 00:25:15.820 --> 00:25:18.160 which seems to me a terrible thing for a small country to do. 550 00:25:19.520 --> 00:25:21.680 Work will continue to be work, but who knows? 551 00:25:21.740 --> 00:25:25.380 Perhaps if we really do get the kind of release of productive energy 552 00:25:25.380 --> 00:25:28.500 that globalisation is alleged or supposed to produce, 553 00:25:28.680 --> 00:25:31.380 somewhere down the track it will be possible to dream again 554 00:25:31.380 --> 00:25:34.220 of seizing the possibility of the abolition of work. 555 00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:37.120 Or at least return to the wisdom of the ancients, 556 00:25:37.120 --> 00:25:39.280 that we should work to live and not live to work. 557 00:25:39.900 --> 00:25:42.940 I have to say I'm puzzled by the notion of the weightless economy, 558 00:25:43.220 --> 00:25:45.480 particularly as somebody who has to carry a, you know, 559 00:25:45.480 --> 00:25:48.720 lug a three kilo laptop down endless airport corridors. 560 00:25:48.940 --> 00:25:51.620 That seems to me the most utterly misconceived explanation 561 00:25:51.620 --> 00:25:54.000 of what's happening that I have ever heard in my life, 562 00:25:54.140 --> 00:25:57.340 and frankly never trust a sociologist to deal with matters 563 00:25:57.340 --> 00:25:59.680 to do with communication, media and information. 564 00:26:00.280 --> 00:26:04.060 Because clearly the infrastructure on which the information economy 565 00:26:04.060 --> 00:26:06.100 runs is something that still needs to be manufactured, 566 00:26:06.380 --> 00:26:09.200 and let it not be forgotten that even though those 567 00:26:09.200 --> 00:26:13.200 wonderful Macintosh iMacs come in wonderful recycled cardboard packages, 568 00:26:13.900 --> 00:26:16.780 it's an incredibly dirty industry by which the circuit boards 569 00:26:16.780 --> 00:26:18.200 themselves actually get made. 570 00:26:18.560 --> 00:26:20.880 So, no, this is not a weightless economy at all. 571 00:26:21.020 --> 00:26:24.440 This is as physically real and spatially determined an economy 572 00:26:24.440 --> 00:26:28.080 as any other, but in which information, a quite remarkable 573 00:26:28.080 --> 00:26:30.440 and interesting property of the physical world, 574 00:26:30.500 --> 00:26:32.240 pays a more and more important part. 575 00:26:32.660 --> 00:26:36.220 To moderate risk and share prosperity, as my colleague put it, 576 00:26:36.280 --> 00:26:38.960 and I think we'd be agreed that that's a wonderful, 577 00:26:39.200 --> 00:26:40.380 wonderful pair of goals to put together, 578 00:26:40.420 --> 00:26:41.740 to moderate risk and share prosperity. 579 00:26:42.180 --> 00:26:44.920 But I'd just like to add another one, what Hegel dreamed of, 580 00:26:45.020 --> 00:26:47.940 which was that the whole reason we kind of struggle and strive 581 00:26:47.940 --> 00:26:51.240 on this planet is to wrest freedom from necessity, 582 00:26:51.560 --> 00:26:55.360 and it seems to me that work is a necessity from which we have yet 583 00:26:55.360 --> 00:26:58.020 to wrest more than a modicum of freedom. 584 00:26:58.260 --> 00:26:58.720 Thank you. 585 00:27:04.680 --> 00:27:06.240 Well, thank you, Mackenzie. 586 00:27:06.440 --> 00:27:07.300 We've had... 587 00:27:08.020 --> 00:27:11.520 We've had Mack provide us with something that resembled pessimism, 588 00:27:11.540 --> 00:27:15.940 Mackenzie something that resembles, well, scepticism at least, 589 00:27:16.200 --> 00:27:19.940 and Damian Broderick, who many of you may have noticed 590 00:27:19.940 --> 00:27:21.300 is not, in fact, Barry Jones... 591 00:27:24.560 --> 00:27:29.980 The beard doesn't sort of go far enough, I think, yeah. 592 00:27:30.980 --> 00:27:35.540 ..has promised us dizzy optimism about the information economy. 593 00:27:36.400 --> 00:27:37.000 OK. 594 00:27:37.520 --> 00:27:43.060 Mark and Ken have provided learned and informed opinions 595 00:27:43.060 --> 00:27:45.120 on the near future. 596 00:27:46.220 --> 00:27:48.280 However, you can now forget everything that they've said. 597 00:27:49.700 --> 00:27:51.360 Stayed conservatives, the pair of them. 598 00:27:51.740 --> 00:27:54.900 The reason for that is that sometime in the next 50 years, 599 00:27:55.120 --> 00:27:56.780 perhaps as early as 2030, 600 00:27:57.380 --> 00:28:01.480 it's arguable that we can expect what's been called a singularity, 601 00:28:02.340 --> 00:28:05.600 a term coined by mathematician and writer Dr Verna Vinci, 602 00:28:06.180 --> 00:28:07.280 which is a spiral. 603 00:28:07.300 --> 00:28:10.020 And it's like, in the upward-soaring graph of historical change, 604 00:28:10.280 --> 00:28:12.380 a wall or horizon of prediction 605 00:28:13.300 --> 00:28:15.780 beyond which we simply cannot see reliably. 606 00:28:16.880 --> 00:28:20.160 Contributing to that horizon will be major scientific breakthroughs, 607 00:28:21.300 --> 00:28:25.260 perhaps leading to extraordinary Faustian technologies 608 00:28:25.260 --> 00:28:29.440 such as rejuvenation of the old and extreme longevity, 609 00:28:31.720 --> 00:28:33.080 molecular nanotechnology... 610 00:28:33.080 --> 00:28:35.560 I'll explain these as we come to them... 611 00:28:35.560 --> 00:28:36.960 ..artificial intelligence, 612 00:28:36.960 --> 00:28:40.180 and even uploading or machine augmentation of human brains. 613 00:28:40.920 --> 00:28:42.980 I call that horizon the spike, 614 00:28:43.200 --> 00:28:46.240 which means that most of our plans for the future 615 00:28:46.240 --> 00:28:49.500 are completely meaningless unless we factor it in. 616 00:28:50.100 --> 00:28:53.280 It mightn't be humans who live there in the world beyond the spike. 617 00:28:53.880 --> 00:28:57.360 More likely, it'll be strange creatures on the near horizon of time, 618 00:28:57.560 --> 00:28:59.620 our own grandchildren or even ourselves, 619 00:28:59.780 --> 00:29:01.680 technologically enhanced and preserved, 620 00:29:03.260 --> 00:29:04.920 transhumans or even posthumans. 621 00:29:05.400 --> 00:29:06.660 It's an alarming thought. 622 00:29:06.960 --> 00:29:08.500 Unless you expect to be amongst them. 623 00:29:08.740 --> 00:29:10.980 The initial slide into transhumanity 624 00:29:10.980 --> 00:29:14.540 for people intimately connected to specially designed computerised neural nets 625 00:29:14.540 --> 00:29:16.160 rather than lugging them through airports 626 00:29:16.920 --> 00:29:20.360 could happen by 2040, 2030, maybe earlier. 627 00:29:20.740 --> 00:29:22.780 This is no longer deep time, 628 00:29:22.960 --> 00:29:24.660 the inconceivably distant future. 629 00:29:25.260 --> 00:29:27.860 These are the dates when quite a few young adults today 630 00:29:27.860 --> 00:29:30.020 expect to be packing away their private possessions 631 00:29:30.020 --> 00:29:31.880 and leaving the office for the last time, 632 00:29:32.040 --> 00:29:34.000 heading for retirement and the pension, 633 00:29:34.140 --> 00:29:35.540 if they're still paying the pension. 634 00:29:36.160 --> 00:29:38.360 These are dates when today's babes in arms 635 00:29:38.360 --> 00:29:40.420 will be strong young adults in the prime of life. 636 00:29:41.120 --> 00:29:43.740 Now, of course, such a technological spike 637 00:29:43.740 --> 00:29:45.420 is a profoundly suspect suggestion, 638 00:29:45.680 --> 00:29:47.300 this close to the turn of the millennium. 639 00:29:47.760 --> 00:29:50.100 We've heard this sort of thing prophesied before 640 00:29:50.100 --> 00:29:53.000 in literally apocalyptic religious revelations 641 00:29:53.000 --> 00:29:54.220 of end time and rapture. 642 00:29:55.060 --> 00:29:56.740 That's not the kind I'm describing. 643 00:29:58.100 --> 00:29:59.580 Here's what will power the spike. 644 00:30:00.740 --> 00:30:04.540 Computer power per dollar currently doubles every year. 645 00:30:05.800 --> 00:30:08.540 And that's not going to slow down any time soon. 646 00:30:09.180 --> 00:30:12.320 In the most advanced machines that we have in the world at the moment, 647 00:30:12.440 --> 00:30:17.380 several trillion calculations per second are being done. 648 00:30:18.260 --> 00:30:21.400 That's 10 or 100 times as many floating point operations 649 00:30:21.400 --> 00:30:25.760 performed every second as there are neurons in a human brain. 650 00:30:27.440 --> 00:30:31.080 Computing power under such acceleration, doubling every year, 651 00:30:31.280 --> 00:30:35.400 seems likely to emulate human intelligence within 15 years. 652 00:30:36.200 --> 00:30:37.360 It's not far off. 653 00:30:37.700 --> 00:30:41.100 At that point, if the chart of the spike is telling us the truth, 654 00:30:42.060 --> 00:30:44.760 we, or eventually our children and grandchildren, 655 00:30:45.080 --> 00:30:48.360 will swiftly see machines with twice the capacity of humans 656 00:30:49.020 --> 00:30:51.360 and then four times our capacity 657 00:30:51.360 --> 00:30:54.900 and then dot, dot, dot. 658 00:30:56.280 --> 00:30:58.520 You see, what's coming, hyper-intelligent machines, 659 00:30:58.860 --> 00:31:00.320 they'll be rewriting their own code 660 00:31:00.320 --> 00:31:02.060 and designing their own hardware improvements. 661 00:31:03.220 --> 00:31:05.520 Six years ago, Professor Wernher Winslow 662 00:31:05.520 --> 00:31:08.600 at the Carnegie addressed a NASA symposium on the 21st century 663 00:31:08.600 --> 00:31:09.820 and he opened with these words, 664 00:31:10.380 --> 00:31:12.920 I argue that we are on the edge of change 665 00:31:12.920 --> 00:31:14.940 comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. 666 00:31:15.540 --> 00:31:18.560 The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation 667 00:31:18.560 --> 00:31:21.800 by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. 668 00:31:23.240 --> 00:31:24.520 So let's say that intelligence spikes. 669 00:31:25.240 --> 00:31:26.300 It won't be our intelligence. 670 00:31:27.020 --> 00:31:28.540 Although with luck and with care, 671 00:31:28.700 --> 00:31:30.900 we'll gain immense benefits from this transition. 672 00:31:32.020 --> 00:31:35.120 The future isn't just coming relentlessly at us, in other words. 673 00:31:35.120 --> 00:31:36.780 It's bringing changes for good and ill. 674 00:31:36.880 --> 00:31:38.460 It's doing so faster and faster, 675 00:31:38.800 --> 00:31:40.840 not uniformly by any means, 676 00:31:40.920 --> 00:31:43.140 frequently with skids backwards and sideways, 677 00:31:43.440 --> 00:31:46.260 but accelerating is what change is doing on the whole. 678 00:31:46.620 --> 00:31:51.520 The 30-year gap between now and the first moon landing 679 00:31:51.520 --> 00:31:54.260 can be calibrated for the future shock we've lived through, 680 00:31:54.440 --> 00:31:57.080 but the next 30-year gap won't just be the same again. 681 00:31:57.380 --> 00:31:59.880 It'll be harder, faster, brighter, more shocking, 682 00:32:00.480 --> 00:32:03.380 equal at least to twice that gap looking backwards, 683 00:32:03.380 --> 00:32:08.800 the equivalent of at least 60 years of our experience to date. 684 00:32:10.140 --> 00:32:11.620 I have an online friendship 685 00:32:11.620 --> 00:32:14.260 with a terrifyingly brilliant computer prodigy in the States 686 00:32:14.260 --> 00:32:16.220 named Eliezer Yadkowsky, 687 00:32:16.300 --> 00:32:19.080 who's designing artificial intelligence systems. 688 00:32:19.420 --> 00:32:23.340 He's 19 now, but when he was 17, he wrote this. 689 00:32:24.060 --> 00:32:26.260 Future Shock, the book by Toffler, 690 00:32:26.360 --> 00:32:29.740 was written in 1970 and proposed that the rate of change 691 00:32:29.740 --> 00:32:32.440 has exceeded the human ability to deal with it. 692 00:32:32.760 --> 00:32:33.360 What's the point? 693 00:32:33.360 --> 00:32:34.720 1970? Ha! 694 00:32:35.460 --> 00:32:37.780 Since then, of course, things have gotten so bad 695 00:32:37.780 --> 00:32:40.940 that we could speak of inflation-adjusted 1970 years 696 00:32:40.940 --> 00:32:43.340 when making futurological predictions. 697 00:32:44.120 --> 00:32:47.140 A 1970 year now buys only three months. 698 00:32:48.380 --> 00:32:52.180 50 years from now, adjusted for inflation, is about 2010. 699 00:32:53.600 --> 00:32:55.740 If we try to account for future inflation 700 00:32:55.740 --> 00:32:59.100 at around 5% inflation per 1997 year, 701 00:32:59.220 --> 00:33:02.760 we find that eternity is only 2017 or so. 702 00:33:05.760 --> 00:33:08.700 Well, let's be a tad more conservative than that. 703 00:33:09.120 --> 00:33:12.860 It might be that the changes we'll be hammered by in the next 30 years 704 00:33:12.860 --> 00:33:16.140 will only equal the disruptions a man or woman from the 1920s would meet 705 00:33:16.140 --> 00:33:17.920 if they were snapped into 1999. 706 00:33:19.160 --> 00:33:20.820 They'd deal with it, but not easily. 707 00:33:21.760 --> 00:33:25.100 Speak to the wise old people who grew up in the 1920s 708 00:33:25.100 --> 00:33:28.400 and ask what they can impart to us on the likely impact of the Internet, 709 00:33:28.620 --> 00:33:31.880 the impact of cheap mobile phones and instant global news, 710 00:33:32.100 --> 00:33:33.340 of imminent global warming, 711 00:33:33.340 --> 00:33:35.140 of human cloning and nervous system repair, 712 00:33:35.440 --> 00:33:37.840 the swift mapping and expression of the human genome. 713 00:33:38.940 --> 00:33:40.580 People who were awestruck children 714 00:33:40.580 --> 00:33:44.440 when humans totted up from the ground for the very first time in powered craft, 715 00:33:44.560 --> 00:33:46.900 who can now remember seeing crisp pictures of a small machine 716 00:33:46.900 --> 00:33:48.380 rolling around in the dust of Mars. 717 00:33:49.440 --> 00:33:51.740 Now, squeeze that change into two or three decades. 718 00:33:52.240 --> 00:33:53.600 That's the scale of the thing. 719 00:33:53.760 --> 00:33:55.980 That's what's going to smash into us if everything goes on 720 00:33:55.980 --> 00:33:59.560 at the current exponentiating rate by the first third of the coming century. 721 00:34:00.360 --> 00:34:01.860 Will we be able to deal with it? 722 00:34:01.860 --> 00:34:03.160 I don't know. 723 00:34:03.660 --> 00:34:04.700 Best of luck. 724 00:34:05.600 --> 00:34:07.940 These are some of the features of a spiking world. 725 00:34:08.400 --> 00:34:09.920 Augmentation of human abilities 726 00:34:09.920 --> 00:34:13.420 by connecting us to neural networks that are not in themselves aware 727 00:34:13.420 --> 00:34:15.660 but can amplify our native abilities. 728 00:34:16.980 --> 00:34:19.300 As we've seen, human-level artificial intelligence 729 00:34:19.300 --> 00:34:21.520 swiftly followed by hyper-intelligent AIs, 730 00:34:21.660 --> 00:34:23.680 an AI and artificial intelligence. 731 00:34:24.320 --> 00:34:27.480 Perhaps even what's called uploads of human minds into computers, 732 00:34:28.140 --> 00:34:30.200 the sort of matrix proposition 733 00:34:30.200 --> 00:34:31.840 so that people can live in it 734 00:34:31.860 --> 00:34:34.000 and live, work, play and create glorious art 735 00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:37.180 inside rich machine-generated virtual realities. 736 00:34:37.720 --> 00:34:39.760 One of the most important, nanotechnology. 737 00:34:40.240 --> 00:34:42.580 Machines, including artificial intelligences, 738 00:34:42.680 --> 00:34:44.100 built from the atom up, 739 00:34:44.220 --> 00:34:46.840 including extremely tiny self-replicating devices 740 00:34:46.840 --> 00:34:48.760 no larger than viruses or molecules. 741 00:34:49.380 --> 00:34:53.380 DNA genome control with the capacity to redesign ourselves and our children, 742 00:34:53.580 --> 00:34:57.680 enhancing not just mind, as some sceptics suggest, 743 00:34:58.040 --> 00:35:00.740 but every bodily and emotional pleasure and aptitude. 744 00:35:00.740 --> 00:35:03.160 Bear in mind that the Human Genome Project 745 00:35:03.740 --> 00:35:05.460 should be complete in the next couple of years. 746 00:35:06.600 --> 00:35:09.760 Physical longevity and even what we might call immortality, 747 00:35:09.760 --> 00:35:10.540 apart from accidents, 748 00:35:10.780 --> 00:35:12.980 due to a mix of the preceding factors. 749 00:35:13.840 --> 00:35:16.220 Understanding and control of our genetic inheritance, 750 00:35:16.420 --> 00:35:18.400 including genes that limit lifespan 751 00:35:18.400 --> 00:35:21.880 by restricting the number of times most somatic cells can be copied or repaired. 752 00:35:22.340 --> 00:35:25.220 Medical repair systems that live inside the body from birth 753 00:35:25.220 --> 00:35:28.420 and keep cells rejuvenated and free of disease, including cancers. 754 00:35:29.120 --> 00:35:30.720 Even backup copies of our DNA 755 00:35:30.740 --> 00:35:32.520 and our memories, maintained in machine storage 756 00:35:32.520 --> 00:35:33.940 in case of damage to the brain. 757 00:35:35.340 --> 00:35:38.180 How do you get to this absurd utopian future? 758 00:35:38.420 --> 00:35:41.460 Well, let's consider briefly just one of those mind-boggling possibilities, 759 00:35:41.840 --> 00:35:43.060 molecular nanotechnology, 760 00:35:43.840 --> 00:35:45.520 which has entered the news recently 761 00:35:45.520 --> 00:35:48.060 following some surprising breakthroughs in miniaturisation. 762 00:35:48.680 --> 00:35:50.860 You might recall the announcement a year or two back 763 00:35:50.860 --> 00:35:53.060 of a chemical sensor developed in Australia 764 00:35:53.060 --> 00:35:54.760 by Dr Bruce Cornell and his team. 765 00:35:54.960 --> 00:35:59.040 It's a kind of sniffer with working parts at molecular scale. 766 00:35:59.700 --> 00:36:00.720 An Australian scientist, 767 00:36:00.740 --> 00:36:02.140 and then-chemist Professor Michael Wilson 768 00:36:02.140 --> 00:36:03.640 at Sydney's University of Technology, 769 00:36:03.920 --> 00:36:06.760 heads several laboratories working on a nanoscale motor 770 00:36:07.540 --> 00:36:10.440 with working parts in the billionths of a metre. 771 00:36:11.440 --> 00:36:13.540 But the real secret promise of nanotech 772 00:36:13.540 --> 00:36:15.840 is not that it involves gadgets the size of viruses. 773 00:36:16.920 --> 00:36:20.080 Tiny little machines at the scale of atoms are part of the plan, 774 00:36:20.200 --> 00:36:22.420 but the correct way to think about the still unborn field, 775 00:36:22.640 --> 00:36:23.960 according to Dr Rolf Merkel, 776 00:36:24.180 --> 00:36:26.040 who works with Dr Eric Drexler, 777 00:36:26.060 --> 00:36:29.820 Dr Eric Drexler pioneer in nanotechnology, 778 00:36:29.820 --> 00:36:30.760 is this. 779 00:36:30.920 --> 00:36:32.680 It would be a manufacturing technology 780 00:36:33.300 --> 00:36:35.940 able to fabricate with molecular precision 781 00:36:35.940 --> 00:36:39.160 almost any structure consistent with physical law 782 00:36:39.800 --> 00:36:42.000 and to do so inexpensively 783 00:36:43.300 --> 00:36:45.840 from common atoms, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. 784 00:36:47.180 --> 00:36:48.720 If you have the plans for it, 785 00:36:48.740 --> 00:36:51.460 the computer algorithm describing its structure, 786 00:36:51.560 --> 00:36:52.840 and you only need to get it once, 787 00:36:53.820 --> 00:36:55.720 and the laws of physics don't forbid it, 788 00:36:55.820 --> 00:36:57.300 you can build whatever you wish 789 00:36:57.820 --> 00:36:59.800 using self-replicating molecular assumptions. 790 00:36:59.820 --> 00:37:02.980 The assemblers themselves make copies of themselves, 791 00:37:03.600 --> 00:37:06.200 so the whole nature of production changes instantly. 792 00:37:07.300 --> 00:37:09.220 Every atom will be in the right place, 793 00:37:09.320 --> 00:37:12.340 as specified by the computer program driving its assembly, 794 00:37:13.080 --> 00:37:15.720 of course, assuming that the computer program can be trusted. 795 00:37:16.820 --> 00:37:19.240 You can expect to nanofact your tiny dedicated computers 796 00:37:19.240 --> 00:37:22.800 the size of bacteria to control the hues of your smart paint wall 797 00:37:23.700 --> 00:37:26.340 or photovoltaic cells that pave the street 798 00:37:26.340 --> 00:37:28.360 and the roof of your house 799 00:37:28.360 --> 00:37:31.180 and provide your electricity at very little extra cost. 800 00:37:31.360 --> 00:37:33.180 So cheap you won't have to meter it, 801 00:37:33.240 --> 00:37:35.420 as they used to say about atomic energy, 802 00:37:35.540 --> 00:37:36.500 which might make one wonder. 803 00:37:38.720 --> 00:37:40.780 Surgical gadgets that swim into your chromosomes 804 00:37:40.780 --> 00:37:42.500 and repair the fraying telomeres 805 00:37:42.500 --> 00:37:45.180 that help bring on death in all complex organisms. 806 00:37:45.980 --> 00:37:48.840 Really, nanotechnology will be a way to remake the world 807 00:37:48.840 --> 00:37:51.840 at our own mesoscale, midway between the atom and the cosmos, 808 00:37:52.780 --> 00:37:55.780 and to abolish work in a trice. 809 00:37:56.700 --> 00:37:58.180 We can reasonably expect 810 00:37:58.180 --> 00:38:01.980 material profusion in a world of tiny smart machines. 811 00:38:02.940 --> 00:38:05.440 For the immediate future, nanoscale assemblers 812 00:38:05.440 --> 00:38:06.500 remain on the drawing boards, 813 00:38:06.740 --> 00:38:08.600 awaiting a lot of detailed engineering, 814 00:38:09.460 --> 00:38:11.580 but ready for the major development push 815 00:38:12.180 --> 00:38:13.860 that will yield the new technology. 816 00:38:15.200 --> 00:38:17.420 If you've got a nanofactoring system 817 00:38:17.420 --> 00:38:19.180 and a supply of cheap raw materials, 818 00:38:19.260 --> 00:38:22.800 raw carbon, raw oxygen and so on, 819 00:38:22.900 --> 00:38:26.020 there's no obvious reason why you can't compile 820 00:38:26.020 --> 00:38:27.180 clothing, food, 821 00:38:27.400 --> 00:38:30.000 creature comfort, smart underground pipes 822 00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:31.440 to fetch you water in the desert. 823 00:38:32.640 --> 00:38:34.300 Once the technology matures, 824 00:38:35.180 --> 00:38:37.780 it's expected that these machines 825 00:38:37.780 --> 00:38:40.240 will be able to disassemble and reconstitute 826 00:38:40.240 --> 00:38:41.960 garbage and old refrigerators 827 00:38:41.960 --> 00:38:44.840 into steak and maglev rapid transit vehicles, 828 00:38:46.020 --> 00:38:48.100 all with a minimum of greenhouse emission, 829 00:38:48.860 --> 00:38:51.100 powered by cheaply assembled solar cells. 830 00:38:52.780 --> 00:38:55.780 Are we smart enough to design and build these nano-assemblers 831 00:38:55.780 --> 00:38:56.840 and keep them under control? 832 00:38:56.840 --> 00:38:58.020 You might doubt it. 833 00:38:58.800 --> 00:39:00.500 But all these vectors add together. 834 00:39:00.620 --> 00:39:03.640 Early nanotech helps improve the supercomputers, 835 00:39:03.700 --> 00:39:05.740 and they help design and debug 836 00:39:05.740 --> 00:39:07.760 more advanced matter compilers. 837 00:39:07.920 --> 00:39:10.380 And so the bootstrapping of utopia continues 838 00:39:11.060 --> 00:39:13.200 until one day the world looks around itself 839 00:39:13.840 --> 00:39:15.700 in 2030 or 2040 840 00:39:15.700 --> 00:39:17.460 and notices that everything, 841 00:39:18.160 --> 00:39:19.400 pretty nearly everything, 842 00:39:19.640 --> 00:39:20.540 has altered. 843 00:39:21.480 --> 00:39:24.560 Except, naturally, the poetic mysteries of the human heart. 844 00:39:25.680 --> 00:39:27.500 But even the heart will be infested 845 00:39:27.500 --> 00:39:29.540 by diligent cholesterol-scrubbing nanites. 846 00:39:33.640 --> 00:39:34.820 So is this all nonsense? 847 00:39:34.960 --> 00:39:36.540 Is it all too far off to be relevant 848 00:39:36.540 --> 00:39:37.840 to us standard-model humans, 849 00:39:37.960 --> 00:39:39.860 still stuck here at the end of the 20th century? 850 00:39:40.360 --> 00:39:42.020 I have to leave that for you to judge. 851 00:39:43.280 --> 00:39:44.280 Perhaps with the help 852 00:39:45.180 --> 00:39:47.200 and here's the mandatory plug, folks, 853 00:39:47.860 --> 00:39:50.600 of my two most recent books on the runaway future, 854 00:39:50.720 --> 00:39:52.420 The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation. 855 00:39:53.360 --> 00:39:53.900 Thank you. 856 00:39:54.580 --> 00:39:55.060 APPLAUSE 857 00:39:56.960 --> 00:39:58.340 Thank you very much, Damien. 858 00:39:58.960 --> 00:40:02.740 You may have noticed me skulking off the stage there for a second. 859 00:40:02.940 --> 00:40:04.820 I was getting a message, and the message is, 860 00:40:04.900 --> 00:40:07.220 there are plenty of good seats for Hello Dolly 861 00:40:07.220 --> 00:40:09.120 at the Festival Theatre this evening. 862 00:40:09.300 --> 00:40:10.560 If you do not have a ticket, 863 00:40:10.740 --> 00:40:13.320 just go over there and queue for a ticket, 864 00:40:13.480 --> 00:40:16.460 and we won't start till everybody's seated. 865 00:40:17.280 --> 00:40:18.880 Now, people have questions. 866 00:40:25.760 --> 00:40:26.920 Would you start, please? 867 00:40:27.140 --> 00:40:27.400 Thank you. 868 00:40:27.560 --> 00:40:29.060 To our last speaker... 869 00:40:29.060 --> 00:40:29.900 Sorry, I didn't get your name. 870 00:40:30.320 --> 00:40:31.180 Damien Broderick. 871 00:40:31.400 --> 00:40:32.060 Right. Hello, Duncan. 872 00:40:33.880 --> 00:40:36.180 Now, with your predictions and so on, 873 00:40:36.240 --> 00:40:37.180 that's all very well, 874 00:40:37.240 --> 00:40:38.400 but really, in the last century, 875 00:40:38.900 --> 00:40:40.820 there have been inventions and discoveries 876 00:40:40.820 --> 00:40:43.100 that could have made things much cheaper to the consumer, 877 00:40:43.320 --> 00:40:44.760 such as water-driven vehicles, 878 00:40:45.360 --> 00:40:46.400 which have been suppressed. 879 00:40:47.600 --> 00:40:50.960 Now, your notions of nanotechnology and so on, 880 00:40:51.060 --> 00:40:52.740 which could make things much cheaper 881 00:40:52.740 --> 00:40:54.540 and then not necessitate any more money, 882 00:40:54.560 --> 00:40:55.280 but actually make our need to work, 883 00:40:56.160 --> 00:40:58.340 all things given and all things being equal, 884 00:40:59.260 --> 00:41:01.920 if the capitalists do not want to turn a profit, 885 00:41:02.120 --> 00:41:02.980 that may be true, 886 00:41:03.580 --> 00:41:06.060 but what's to say they won't suppress that kind of technology 887 00:41:06.060 --> 00:41:08.400 in order to keep us as slaves to the capitalist system? 888 00:41:09.360 --> 00:41:10.420 Have you any answers to that? 889 00:41:10.680 --> 00:41:13.880 I have my doubts about whether, you know, 890 00:41:13.880 --> 00:41:16.100 these wonderful technologies have actually been suppressed. 891 00:41:16.160 --> 00:41:18.560 It seems to me that that's more folklore than anything else. 892 00:41:19.020 --> 00:41:20.940 It's certainly the case that, you know, 893 00:41:20.940 --> 00:41:23.560 some, you know, rapid transit, 894 00:41:23.700 --> 00:41:27.960 cheap public transport is constantly being suppressed, 895 00:41:28.200 --> 00:41:30.640 you know, so that there'll be more cars on more roads. 896 00:41:30.880 --> 00:41:34.300 But the interesting thing about the kinds of technologies 897 00:41:34.300 --> 00:41:35.740 that I'm talking about are twofold. 898 00:41:35.840 --> 00:41:39.140 One is that a lot of the work, the engineering work, 899 00:41:39.280 --> 00:41:41.460 the theoretical work is being done on the web, 900 00:41:41.620 --> 00:41:44.140 which means that anybody anywhere in the world 901 00:41:44.140 --> 00:41:46.900 with a modem and a computer can plug into this. 902 00:41:47.180 --> 00:41:49.540 And there are conversations going on 903 00:41:50.160 --> 00:41:52.540 by people who just are interested in this stuff. 904 00:41:52.540 --> 00:41:56.400 It becomes a kind of leisure-time activity 905 00:41:56.400 --> 00:41:57.720 to design these things. 906 00:41:57.900 --> 00:41:59.760 And, you know, particularly smart young kids 907 00:41:59.760 --> 00:42:01.840 like this guy Eliezer that I'm talking about 908 00:42:02.540 --> 00:42:04.780 can work with the finest minds in the world. 909 00:42:04.880 --> 00:42:08.300 And they do it because it gives them, you know, 910 00:42:08.340 --> 00:42:10.640 personal enhancement, you know. 911 00:42:10.700 --> 00:42:12.040 They become famous. 912 00:42:12.140 --> 00:42:14.680 Everyone admires them, rather like graffiti artists. 913 00:42:15.100 --> 00:42:17.480 And the other thing is that once this kind of... 914 00:42:17.480 --> 00:42:20.700 Once these programs have been developed in this way 915 00:42:21.740 --> 00:42:22.300 and... 916 00:42:22.540 --> 00:42:23.740 and sent out through the web 917 00:42:23.740 --> 00:42:25.940 so that the first assemblers are built... 918 00:42:25.940 --> 00:42:27.440 Well, of course, the first assemblers will, in fact, 919 00:42:27.440 --> 00:42:28.820 be built by capitalist institutions 920 00:42:29.720 --> 00:42:31.480 and there'll be a big profit in them. 921 00:42:31.620 --> 00:42:35.160 But because they're self-replicating in some measure, 922 00:42:35.240 --> 00:42:38.080 these tiny little gadgets have the capacity 923 00:42:38.080 --> 00:42:41.080 to break free of that kind of centralised control. 924 00:42:41.180 --> 00:42:43.380 I mean, whether it's the central government 925 00:42:43.380 --> 00:42:45.800 or the massive corporation, 926 00:42:46.140 --> 00:42:50.540 once the ability to make assemblers develops, 927 00:42:52.000 --> 00:42:52.520 once the ability to make assemblers develops, 928 00:42:52.540 --> 00:42:56.160 it changes the nature of production utterly. 929 00:42:56.520 --> 00:43:00.400 Now, there may be ways for people to control it. 930 00:43:00.440 --> 00:43:01.340 I can't think of any. 931 00:43:01.880 --> 00:43:05.320 A worse worry is that they get out of hand. 932 00:43:05.360 --> 00:43:06.220 They mutate. 933 00:43:07.100 --> 00:43:09.220 We get what's called the grey goo catastrophe 934 00:43:09.220 --> 00:43:13.040 when these things run around gobbling up everything in sight 935 00:43:13.040 --> 00:43:14.400 and turning it into sludge. 936 00:43:14.860 --> 00:43:16.780 But again, there are ways around that. 937 00:43:16.860 --> 00:43:20.580 You make sure that they have to have a certain kind of rare metal 938 00:43:20.580 --> 00:43:21.480 as a vitamin. 939 00:43:21.480 --> 00:43:23.560 Before they'll work. 940 00:43:23.740 --> 00:43:25.860 But I don't want to go into too much detail like that. 941 00:43:25.900 --> 00:43:28.920 But I do think that it takes a lot of paradigm shifting 942 00:43:28.920 --> 00:43:32.480 to realise that this new kind of technology, 943 00:43:32.560 --> 00:43:35.400 in effect, takes us back to the Neolithic period 944 00:43:35.400 --> 00:43:38.120 when people were able to get their sustenance 945 00:43:38.120 --> 00:43:42.160 from the local ecology, from the trees, from foraging. 946 00:43:42.720 --> 00:43:44.580 Suddenly, we'll have the equivalent of that 947 00:43:45.240 --> 00:43:48.620 because there'll be no place for mega corporations any longer. 948 00:43:49.620 --> 00:43:51.460 Damian, I suspect nanotechnology 949 00:43:51.480 --> 00:43:53.800 will be about as reliable as Windows 95. 950 00:43:53.960 --> 00:43:55.800 You going to inject that in your body? 951 00:44:00.900 --> 00:44:02.360 Over here, please. 952 00:44:02.780 --> 00:44:03.340 Hello. 953 00:44:04.860 --> 00:44:08.240 As a young person, I'm a graphic designer. 954 00:44:08.560 --> 00:44:14.520 When I started my course at the University of South Australia in 1988, 955 00:44:15.460 --> 00:44:18.940 it was a craft and people knew how to typeset 956 00:44:18.940 --> 00:44:20.680 and they knew how to use their hands. 957 00:44:21.480 --> 00:44:24.880 And in the 10 years or 11 years since then, 958 00:44:25.000 --> 00:44:28.040 it's gone straight over to computers 959 00:44:28.040 --> 00:44:30.940 and you need to keep up with technology 960 00:44:31.480 --> 00:44:33.380 and keep up with hardware and software. 961 00:44:33.680 --> 00:44:34.880 And it's expensive. 962 00:44:35.340 --> 00:44:37.920 And now, I was just wondering, 963 00:44:38.140 --> 00:44:41.880 John Ruskin talked about craft 964 00:44:41.880 --> 00:44:45.300 and he rejuvenated a lot of crafts in England. 965 00:44:45.540 --> 00:44:49.540 And I was wondering whether, Mackenzie, 966 00:44:49.540 --> 00:44:53.560 whether you feel that in the future, 967 00:44:53.680 --> 00:44:55.680 there'll be a backlash against technology 968 00:44:55.680 --> 00:44:57.100 and we'll go back to the craft. 969 00:44:58.940 --> 00:45:02.660 A craft, I think, is necessarily a way of working with technology. 970 00:45:03.800 --> 00:45:06.720 I mean, actually, I also studied graphic design 971 00:45:06.720 --> 00:45:10.580 and there were people who used previous technologies, 972 00:45:10.720 --> 00:45:12.340 such as who could work in hot metal, 973 00:45:12.460 --> 00:45:14.020 who thought we were the end of the world 974 00:45:14.540 --> 00:45:15.680 because we'd abolished all that. 975 00:45:15.960 --> 00:45:17.960 So people's sense of value of craft 976 00:45:17.960 --> 00:45:21.120 always seems to me to be quite sort of specific. 977 00:45:21.820 --> 00:45:24.360 But one thing, and Scott Lash did some interesting work on this, 978 00:45:24.420 --> 00:45:27.240 on who's getting work in graphic design in Europe. 979 00:45:27.480 --> 00:45:30.880 And what he found was it wasn't people who were trained in graphic design, 980 00:45:30.960 --> 00:45:32.060 it was people coming out of art schools. 981 00:45:32.420 --> 00:45:34.760 The reason being that they weren't being trained 982 00:45:34.760 --> 00:45:37.460 how to use a particular technology because those last five minutes 983 00:45:37.460 --> 00:45:39.960 were people who were trained really to get results 984 00:45:39.960 --> 00:45:41.240 and then look for the technology 985 00:45:41.240 --> 00:45:43.680 that would give them the result that was envisaged. 986 00:45:43.840 --> 00:45:45.960 So in a sense, what may be required 987 00:45:45.960 --> 00:45:47.500 is a different relation to training, 988 00:45:47.960 --> 00:45:49.580 something I'm sure Mark knows a lot more about. 989 00:45:49.840 --> 00:45:53.940 But the craft is using your mind in addition to using your hands. 990 00:45:55.620 --> 00:45:56.780 It's a combination of both. 991 00:45:56.940 --> 00:46:00.400 But why are older technologies always better? 992 00:46:00.600 --> 00:46:02.660 I mean, certainly people who work with some of the sort of 993 00:46:03.620 --> 00:46:05.920 grubby and dangerous technologies of the past, 994 00:46:05.960 --> 00:46:07.040 I think, would really doubt that 995 00:46:07.040 --> 00:46:08.880 and would much rather be sitting at a computer. 996 00:46:10.980 --> 00:46:12.320 Up the top, please. 997 00:46:12.680 --> 00:46:14.780 Yes, good afternoon, gentlemen. 998 00:46:15.260 --> 00:46:16.560 Mr McKenzie in particular, 999 00:46:16.560 --> 00:46:22.300 you spoke of the intellectual elite class that was being formed. 1000 00:46:23.560 --> 00:46:26.880 I'd like your views on the fact that money is possibly the only thing 1001 00:46:27.720 --> 00:46:31.540 left to provide some sort of natural selection in nature 1002 00:46:32.020 --> 00:46:36.140 since we seem to be taking over Mother Nature's role 1003 00:46:36.140 --> 00:46:39.020 of deciding who lives, who dies, etc, etc. 1004 00:46:39.160 --> 00:46:40.120 And as far as nanotechnology, 1005 00:46:41.720 --> 00:46:44.000 anything made by man is going to be fallible, isn't it? 1006 00:46:45.200 --> 00:46:46.440 Yeah, I'm always sceptical. 1007 00:46:46.560 --> 00:46:49.220 I'm sceptical about the analogy between the economy and nature 1008 00:46:49.220 --> 00:46:50.680 because when I look at nature, 1009 00:46:50.820 --> 00:46:53.760 you know, who are the trial lawyers of nature? 1010 00:46:54.400 --> 00:46:57.420 You know, where are the accountants in nature? 1011 00:46:57.840 --> 00:47:01.180 You know, where are the management consultants in nature? 1012 00:47:01.380 --> 00:47:03.960 You know, nature seems to get by without a lot of the things 1013 00:47:03.960 --> 00:47:08.240 that are entirely artificial and sort of human constructions. 1014 00:47:08.740 --> 00:47:14.520 And, of course, nature has an immensely complex system 1015 00:47:14.520 --> 00:47:17.800 of ways of forwarding information into the future 1016 00:47:17.800 --> 00:47:21.540 and of testing what kinds of information will be forwarded into the future. 1017 00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:22.840 It doesn't rely on just one mechanism. 1018 00:47:23.540 --> 00:47:25.420 But that seems to me to be the problem 1019 00:47:25.420 --> 00:47:28.660 with the notion that the market is, you know, somehow natural. 1020 00:47:29.440 --> 00:47:31.740 Well, markets are wonderful things. I've nothing against them. 1021 00:47:31.820 --> 00:47:34.320 But they're only one of a range of possible institutions 1022 00:47:34.320 --> 00:47:37.380 for assessing value and allocating resources. 1023 00:47:37.660 --> 00:47:41.720 And the thing that is the sort of the constant struggle of the modern world 1024 00:47:41.720 --> 00:47:43.920 is what the relationship between them is going to be. 1025 00:47:43.920 --> 00:47:47.280 So, no, money isn't everything, but, you know, it counts for a lot. 1026 00:47:49.360 --> 00:47:50.100 Over to you, please. 1027 00:47:50.200 --> 00:47:53.480 Yes, I wish Mark Cully had given the full quote from Keynes, 1028 00:47:54.100 --> 00:47:56.120 his essay in the 1930s. 1029 00:47:56.200 --> 00:47:57.380 He ended up by saying, 1030 00:47:57.420 --> 00:47:58.860 in 100 years' time in society, 1031 00:47:59.520 --> 00:48:02.060 I'll only need people to work 15 hours per week 1032 00:48:02.060 --> 00:48:04.960 to produce all the goods and services that society need. 1033 00:48:05.280 --> 00:48:06.820 And this was backed up by Einstein. 1034 00:48:07.000 --> 00:48:11.580 If people read his book, Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, 1035 00:48:12.120 --> 00:48:13.380 you'll see he backs it up. 1036 00:48:13.420 --> 00:48:13.760 And also, 1037 00:48:14.580 --> 00:48:17.100 Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness, 1038 00:48:17.320 --> 00:48:18.640 and I think it's about page 18, 1039 00:48:18.920 --> 00:48:22.980 which people call the Parable of the Pins. 1040 00:48:23.340 --> 00:48:25.220 And he says that people... 1041 00:48:25.220 --> 00:48:27.240 ..the working hours should be reduced and so on 1042 00:48:27.240 --> 00:48:31.200 because we don't need people working the full 40 or whatever it was hours. 1043 00:48:31.500 --> 00:48:33.600 Now, this has got to be used as a counter 1044 00:48:33.600 --> 00:48:37.080 to the modern economists who think after pages of mathematics, 1045 00:48:38.280 --> 00:48:40.080 you need a lowly paid... 1046 00:48:40.080 --> 00:48:42.900 ..a large pool of lowly paid, easily sackable workforce. 1047 00:48:42.900 --> 00:48:45.300 This maximises the utility function 1048 00:48:45.300 --> 00:48:48.020 and it produces the most efficient economy. 1049 00:48:48.380 --> 00:48:51.700 So I do recommend people read Einstein, Bertrand Russell 1050 00:48:51.700 --> 00:48:55.460 and the essay by Keynes in 1930. 1051 00:48:55.980 --> 00:48:56.540 Here, here. 1052 00:48:59.280 --> 00:49:00.540 Do you have any...? 1053 00:49:00.540 --> 00:49:03.860 I wasn't quite sure whether that was a statement or a question. 1054 00:49:04.200 --> 00:49:08.020 The Keynes and Russell essays are certainly definitely well worth... 1055 00:49:12.920 --> 00:49:13.420 ..the work that's been done, 1056 00:49:13.420 --> 00:49:15.480 but I don't know if it's a great example of any technology design 1057 00:49:15.480 --> 00:49:17.020 by the state of the art, 1058 00:49:17.200 --> 00:49:20.220 or the pace of physical work that's been done, 1059 00:49:20.220 --> 00:49:23.380 including this to fight power and science. 1060 00:49:23.920 --> 00:49:25.060 But I'm not sure. 1061 00:49:25.060 --> 00:49:26.520 How would you think that the world would think 1062 00:49:26.520 --> 00:49:28.260 that the media would use the working hours? 1063 00:49:29.420 --> 00:49:31.480 Sure. Well, I don't know that I'd disagree with that. 1064 00:49:31.540 --> 00:49:34.980 I mean, but we keep inventing new...new work 1065 00:49:34.980 --> 00:49:38.600 that is considered to be by the market of value. 1066 00:49:38.900 --> 00:49:41.920 If we just go back to this concept of weightlessness, 1067 00:49:41.920 --> 00:49:45.380 which McKenzie disparaged before... 1068 00:49:45.380 --> 00:49:47.320 I mean, I don't think I'm actually... Weight. Weight. 1069 00:49:47.440 --> 00:49:48.500 ..that far removed from him 1070 00:49:48.500 --> 00:49:50.480 when he talks about the information economy. 1071 00:49:50.620 --> 00:49:52.020 What I'm talking about are the things that we produce 1072 00:49:52.020 --> 00:49:54.440 that are valued now, 1073 00:49:55.720 --> 00:49:58.080 relative to things that are weighty, 1074 00:49:58.100 --> 00:50:00.600 are considered by the market to have more value. 1075 00:50:00.760 --> 00:50:02.820 So his articles that he writes... 1076 00:50:04.380 --> 00:50:07.720 ..is now working at a rate such as 4 by 20... 1077 00:50:07.720 --> 00:50:08.660 ..use of light... 1078 00:50:08.660 --> 00:50:09.620 ..use of light... 1079 00:50:09.620 --> 00:50:10.620 ..to create energy... 1080 00:50:10.620 --> 00:50:11.280 ..to start... 1081 00:50:12.160 --> 00:50:13.420 Shall we move on? 1082 00:50:13.560 --> 00:50:14.080 Shall we move on? 1083 00:50:14.080 --> 00:50:15.020 Yes, perhaps we'll move on. 1084 00:50:15.380 --> 00:50:15.660 I think... 1085 00:50:15.660 --> 00:50:15.680 I think... 1086 00:50:15.680 --> 00:50:16.020 I think... 1087 00:50:16.020 --> 00:50:16.120 I think... 1088 00:50:16.120 --> 00:50:16.160 I think... 1089 00:50:16.160 --> 00:50:16.320 I think... 1090 00:50:16.320 --> 00:50:16.420 I think... 1091 00:50:16.420 --> 00:50:16.520 I think... 1092 00:50:16.520 --> 00:50:16.800 I think... 1093 00:50:16.800 --> 00:50:16.860 I think... 1094 00:50:16.860 --> 00:50:16.940 I think... 1095 00:50:16.940 --> 00:50:17.040 I think... 1096 00:50:17.040 --> 00:50:18.780 I think... 1097 00:50:18.780 --> 00:50:20.560 I think... 1098 00:50:20.560 --> 00:50:20.580 I think... 1099 00:50:20.580 --> 00:50:21.340 I think... 1100 00:50:21.340 --> 00:50:22.420 I think... 1101 00:50:22.420 --> 00:50:23.960 I think... 1102 00:50:24.960 --> 00:50:25.760 I think... 1103 00:50:25.760 --> 00:50:26.500 I think... 1104 00:50:26.500 --> 00:50:27.480 I think... 1105 00:50:27.480 --> 00:50:28.380 I think... 1106 00:50:28.380 --> 00:50:30.460 I think... 1107 00:50:31.440 --> 00:50:32.660 I think... 1108 00:50:33.800 --> 00:50:34.700 I think... 1109 00:50:34.700 --> 00:50:35.720 I think... 1110 00:50:37.960 --> 00:50:39.200 I think... 1111 00:50:39.200 --> 00:50:42.820 and the chefs and the ideas and articles that we want to read, 1112 00:50:42.940 --> 00:50:45.900 we provide for one another and we trade hours rather than wages 1113 00:50:45.900 --> 00:50:48.840 and we move away from a system of modified wages. 1114 00:50:48.840 --> 00:50:52.300 Look, do you agree that we should reduce to, say, a four-day, 30-hour week, 1115 00:50:52.480 --> 00:50:55.360 retiring age at 55 and no reduction in wages? 1116 00:50:55.740 --> 00:50:58.120 I mean, every time there's been a reduction in the working hours, 1117 00:50:58.240 --> 00:50:59.860 there hasn't been a reduction in wages. 1118 00:50:59.860 --> 00:51:03.700 In the earlier session I said I think a more plausible way forward 1119 00:51:03.700 --> 00:51:07.700 is to trade off future wage rises for reductions in hours. 1120 00:51:07.700 --> 00:51:09.000 Because I think that's... 1121 00:51:09.000 --> 00:51:10.340 You don't have to do that. 1122 00:51:11.460 --> 00:51:12.340 Thank you. 1123 00:51:13.480 --> 00:51:14.500 You've been waiting longer. 1124 00:51:15.200 --> 00:51:16.380 Tall gentleman, actually. 1125 00:51:16.420 --> 00:51:20.620 Do you think it's possible that all three run parallel with each other, right, 1126 00:51:20.660 --> 00:51:23.000 and that it will be viable for us to apply all principles 1127 00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:25.220 to achieve what we want to 1128 00:51:25.220 --> 00:51:27.260 and the fact that it's actually not work 1129 00:51:27.260 --> 00:51:29.080 but it's actually purpose of human being? 1130 00:51:29.180 --> 00:51:32.960 If I want to work 100 hours a week for me to excel as a human being, 1131 00:51:33.080 --> 00:51:34.860 shouldn't I be applied that advantage? 1132 00:51:35.220 --> 00:51:36.340 Same sort of thing again. 1133 00:51:36.400 --> 00:51:37.680 If I want to spend 15 hours a week, 1134 00:51:37.680 --> 00:51:39.440 15 hours a day on a computer talking over the net, 1135 00:51:39.560 --> 00:51:41.000 I should be allowed to do that too. 1136 00:51:41.280 --> 00:51:44.340 So with the flexibility of applying all philosophies into this, 1137 00:51:44.440 --> 00:51:45.860 this should allow us to do that 1138 00:51:45.860 --> 00:51:48.220 and have us excel as excellence in human beings. 1139 00:51:48.480 --> 00:51:50.660 But one thing that Damien commented before 1140 00:51:50.660 --> 00:51:53.040 about the grey goo of virtual reality, 1141 00:51:53.340 --> 00:51:56.240 I own a computer shop which is doubling every year. 1142 00:51:56.340 --> 00:51:59.140 And the fact is I almost couldn't stop it, right? 1143 00:51:59.260 --> 00:52:02.980 But with the grey goo and what you refer to as assembly and virtual reality, 1144 00:52:03.220 --> 00:52:05.860 maybe a greater complex of understanding it is 1145 00:52:05.860 --> 00:52:07.540 as we create a single cell, 1146 00:52:07.680 --> 00:52:11.360 a single cell of nanotechnology apply the chaos effect of humans 1147 00:52:11.960 --> 00:52:12.600 into the universe. 1148 00:52:12.880 --> 00:52:15.440 So if we want to see how humans will go into the universe, 1149 00:52:15.600 --> 00:52:18.960 apply how nanotechnology will treat us and our life. 1150 00:52:19.180 --> 00:52:21.940 And how do you feel those three parallel running together? 1151 00:52:23.540 --> 00:52:26.320 Yeah, I personally do very little work and I do 1152 00:52:26.320 --> 00:52:27.580 as little work as I possibly can. 1153 00:52:28.060 --> 00:52:29.980 I put it about three hours a week. 1154 00:52:30.720 --> 00:52:32.760 Of course I'm doing things all the time 1155 00:52:32.760 --> 00:52:34.940 but they're actually things that I seem to enjoy doing. 1156 00:52:35.060 --> 00:52:36.740 So I don't classify them as work. 1157 00:52:36.820 --> 00:52:37.240 They're activities 1158 00:52:37.240 --> 00:52:39.040 that I think I'm doing voluntarily. 1159 00:52:39.260 --> 00:52:41.540 But the key phrase there is I think I'm doing them voluntarily. 1160 00:52:41.920 --> 00:52:43.700 I'm very skeptical if that's really so. 1161 00:52:44.000 --> 00:52:46.040 I think I've probably been sold an ideology 1162 00:52:46.040 --> 00:52:47.820 that what I do is what I enjoy. 1163 00:52:48.420 --> 00:52:52.940 So which is why I put before you that kind of radical avant-garde tradition 1164 00:52:52.940 --> 00:52:55.720 of sort of politicized romanticism. 1165 00:52:55.740 --> 00:52:59.660 A tradition I hold dear from Proudhon to the surrealist 1166 00:52:59.660 --> 00:53:00.900 and situationist and so on. 1167 00:53:01.220 --> 00:53:02.880 Which would ask the question of well, 1168 00:53:02.960 --> 00:53:04.520 actually maybe we've just been sucked in 1169 00:53:04.520 --> 00:53:05.640 and we think we enjoy these things. 1170 00:53:05.680 --> 00:53:06.360 We really don't. 1171 00:53:06.360 --> 00:53:07.160 Because we've never considered 1172 00:53:07.240 --> 00:53:08.140 an alternative, you know. 1173 00:53:09.460 --> 00:53:12.940 So yeah, that's why I'm kind of skeptical of, you know, 1174 00:53:12.940 --> 00:53:15.980 because I live in an environment in Sydney that's full of, you know, 1175 00:53:16.000 --> 00:53:17.820 really motivated sort of successful people. 1176 00:53:18.040 --> 00:53:19.560 But I just sort of want to question them. 1177 00:53:19.580 --> 00:53:20.780 Are you really happy doing that? 1178 00:53:20.880 --> 00:53:22.080 I mean, if you just never considered that. 1179 00:53:22.080 --> 00:53:24.100 Isn't that your purpose or your work? 1180 00:53:24.340 --> 00:53:24.540 Sorry? 1181 00:53:24.660 --> 00:53:26.620 Is that your work or your purpose? 1182 00:53:27.120 --> 00:53:28.060 To question this. 1183 00:53:28.060 --> 00:53:32.020 Well, of course, the other thing is having been raised a secularized Protestant, 1184 00:53:32.200 --> 00:53:33.020 to me there's no difference. 1185 00:53:33.560 --> 00:53:34.040 You know. 1186 00:53:39.100 --> 00:53:43.840 And it struck me, in fact, the other day listening to Gerard Henderson that, 1187 00:53:43.940 --> 00:53:45.700 you know, the Cold War is over and the Communists lost. 1188 00:53:45.980 --> 00:53:47.900 I mean, there's no point arguing whether you're a liberal Democrat 1189 00:53:47.900 --> 00:53:52.020 or a social Democrat, but the sort of Catholic social view of the world 1190 00:53:52.020 --> 00:53:54.900 and the Protestant social view of the world are on the Western sort 1191 00:53:54.900 --> 00:53:57.020 of universe still alive and well. 1192 00:53:57.100 --> 00:53:58.800 And there is an interesting tension between those. 1193 00:53:59.080 --> 00:54:00.480 And having been raised in one of those traditions, 1194 00:54:00.620 --> 00:54:01.840 I'm troubled by it, you know. 1195 00:54:02.500 --> 00:54:04.700 We have windows and that will sort it out. 1196 00:54:04.780 --> 00:54:06.940 We have a 90% of communication. 1197 00:54:06.980 --> 00:54:07.220 Yeah. 1198 00:54:07.240 --> 00:54:07.940 And we have a 90% of communication across the planet, 1199 00:54:08.020 --> 00:54:09.360 which hopefully will allow compatibility. 1200 00:54:09.780 --> 00:54:13.320 So as though something is great, you can't do a billion dollar project 1201 00:54:13.320 --> 00:54:14.400 on a million dollar budget. 1202 00:54:14.740 --> 00:54:18.520 So although something of an entity that large, that actually should unite us. 1203 00:54:18.620 --> 00:54:20.880 So maybe it's more of a purpose of that too. 1204 00:54:24.580 --> 00:54:26.580 Fine. I don't want to take up all the time. 1205 00:54:26.780 --> 00:54:28.240 I think we'll leave this. 1206 00:54:28.320 --> 00:54:28.780 Thank you. 1207 00:54:29.560 --> 00:54:30.520 Thank you very much. 1208 00:54:31.200 --> 00:54:36.420 I'm going to be asking McKenzie afterwards how he manages only to spend three hours a week 1209 00:54:36.420 --> 00:54:37.160 in committee meetings. 1210 00:54:38.480 --> 00:54:40.620 I sleep through those so they don't count. 1211 00:54:43.220 --> 00:54:47.720 Because I also work in a university and I know that that to me feels like work. 1212 00:54:47.980 --> 00:54:49.220 Up the top please. 1213 00:54:50.720 --> 00:54:57.260 Most of the goods and services available today would have never been predicted say 50 years ago. 1214 00:54:58.360 --> 00:55:05.820 Most of your theories are based on applying like nanotechnology and all of that to today 1215 00:55:05.820 --> 00:55:07.220 and not the possible future. 1216 00:55:07.220 --> 00:55:08.220 But what is the possibility of the future? 1217 00:55:11.160 --> 00:55:18.060 All of the new technologies that will be or possibly be produced in the future, 1218 00:55:18.220 --> 00:55:22.080 you aren't applying it to them, you're applying it to everything today. 1219 00:55:24.140 --> 00:55:26.740 So I think that you might want to respond to that. 1220 00:55:26.920 --> 00:55:31.520 The acoustics in this place is so dreadful that I'm picking up about one word in three 1221 00:55:31.520 --> 00:55:34.620 that anybody is saying, but I take it that what you were suggesting 1222 00:55:35.340 --> 00:55:37.180 and probably nobody can hear what I'm saying. 1223 00:55:37.180 --> 00:55:37.740 for the same reasons. 1224 00:55:39.540 --> 00:55:42.180 When the nanomachines are here, you'll be right. 1225 00:55:45.420 --> 00:55:48.400 I take it that what you're saying is that one can come up 1226 00:55:48.400 --> 00:55:51.820 with radical and extraordinarily discontinuous technologies 1227 00:55:51.820 --> 00:55:53.640 of the imagination, like nanotechnology, 1228 00:55:54.020 --> 00:55:56.540 but we still tend to sort of just apply them 1229 00:55:56.540 --> 00:55:58.800 to whether we're going to have our hair done by them 1230 00:55:58.800 --> 00:56:02.420 or whether they'll change the channel for us 1231 00:56:02.420 --> 00:56:06.080 and do our tape recording correctly. 1232 00:56:07.540 --> 00:56:08.760 This is getting worse. 1233 00:56:09.760 --> 00:56:12.820 My feeling about this is that actually the only way 1234 00:56:12.820 --> 00:56:15.060 to think about this sensibly is to realise 1235 00:56:15.060 --> 00:56:18.400 that the new technologies actually reconstruct us 1236 00:56:18.400 --> 00:56:19.900 as conscious beings. 1237 00:56:20.500 --> 00:56:22.840 As Ken said, the upbringing that he had 1238 00:56:23.480 --> 00:56:28.000 turned him into a work ethic, de-God-ised Protestant. 1239 00:56:28.780 --> 00:56:30.780 The same sort of thing happened to me, 1240 00:56:30.780 --> 00:56:32.420 although I was brought up as a Catholic. 1241 00:56:33.040 --> 00:56:34.460 So at least I'll go to heaven. 1242 00:56:40.700 --> 00:56:45.140 But I mean, I also seem, as far as I can tell, 1243 00:56:45.200 --> 00:56:46.280 I seem to work very little. 1244 00:56:47.380 --> 00:56:48.940 I hardly ever do anything. 1245 00:56:49.600 --> 00:56:51.000 But when I actually... 1246 00:56:51.000 --> 00:56:53.160 My days are full. It's quite startling. 1247 00:56:53.240 --> 00:56:57.060 I spend at least four or five hours every day on the net, 1248 00:56:58.180 --> 00:57:02.180 which is probably the equivalent of being sent into solitary confinement. 1249 00:57:02.940 --> 00:57:04.620 It's cruel and unnatural punishment, 1250 00:57:04.800 --> 00:57:07.160 but I've become addicted to it. 1251 00:57:07.180 --> 00:57:09.560 I sit there and I read stuff from all over the world 1252 00:57:09.560 --> 00:57:12.600 and I send out snide comments to people in America. 1253 00:57:14.760 --> 00:57:16.520 This is my idea of fun. 1254 00:57:16.640 --> 00:57:18.920 It's part of my social existence. 1255 00:57:20.940 --> 00:57:23.180 When I come to actually write a book or... 1256 00:57:23.180 --> 00:57:26.740 I mean, I've got two books coming out this month, 1257 00:57:26.860 --> 00:57:27.860 another one in September, 1258 00:57:28.100 --> 00:57:32.520 and I had one in February and one last November or something, 1259 00:57:32.620 --> 00:57:34.860 and I've just finished one, which will be coming out next year. 1260 00:57:35.040 --> 00:57:37.060 And I suppose I must have worked on them. 1261 00:57:37.180 --> 00:57:42.080 But it didn't feel like work. 1262 00:57:42.120 --> 00:57:43.920 I mean, nobody forced me to do it. 1263 00:57:43.960 --> 00:57:45.500 Of course, nobody paid me very much either. 1264 00:57:46.640 --> 00:57:48.660 That's when you know you haven't been working. 1265 00:57:49.940 --> 00:57:53.000 But if I understood the point of the question, 1266 00:57:53.080 --> 00:57:58.560 really, once you recognise that there are these radical new sorts of changes, 1267 00:57:59.340 --> 00:58:02.060 which will actually, I think, be controlled by computers 1268 00:58:02.060 --> 00:58:04.120 that are a little better than Windows 95, 1269 00:58:05.720 --> 00:58:06.920 one would hope so, 1270 00:58:07.180 --> 00:58:10.700 and we will actually find that we as people change, 1271 00:58:11.460 --> 00:58:12.940 or probably literally. 1272 00:58:13.260 --> 00:58:18.480 I mean, I think that we'll be able to rejig our bodies and our minds. 1273 00:58:19.080 --> 00:58:20.220 We'll morph ourselves. 1274 00:58:20.700 --> 00:58:23.800 And there are certain science fiction writers like John Varley 1275 00:58:23.800 --> 00:58:26.720 who've been talking about this sort of thing for at least 20 years, 1276 00:58:26.900 --> 00:58:31.600 and his stories, which are set 100 or 200 years in the future, 1277 00:58:31.640 --> 00:58:33.940 just take it for granted that people change their sex 1278 00:58:33.940 --> 00:58:35.960 by going to the mechanic, you know. 1279 00:58:36.320 --> 00:58:36.840 Um... 1280 00:58:37.180 --> 00:58:39.700 They have their brains taken out and fixed and put back in, 1281 00:58:39.740 --> 00:58:41.040 you know, because antisepsis is... 1282 00:58:41.560 --> 00:58:42.000 So... 1283 00:58:42.560 --> 00:58:45.160 And that's really old-fashioned and conservative science fiction 1284 00:58:45.880 --> 00:58:47.380 from the 70s, you know. 1285 00:58:48.220 --> 00:58:52.860 What we have to realise is that actually the future is going to be different. 1286 00:58:52.920 --> 00:58:56.160 It's not going to be the same, you know, by other means. 1287 00:58:58.200 --> 00:59:01.520 Which gives a whole new sense to the notion of having the rings re-bored. 1288 00:59:03.160 --> 00:59:03.860 Here, sir. 1289 00:59:04.620 --> 00:59:06.880 This is to anyone in the panel who'd like to respond. 1290 00:59:08.260 --> 00:59:13.020 Has very much been defined or has been involved in political questions, 1291 00:59:13.140 --> 00:59:14.900 especially in the industrial age. 1292 00:59:15.840 --> 00:59:20.120 And there has been...has been raised the notion of purpose. 1293 00:59:20.240 --> 00:59:22.120 I think that's what...well, certainly that's what I'm feeling, 1294 00:59:22.200 --> 00:59:25.080 this question of, like, you know, why do I work and when am I working, 1295 00:59:25.800 --> 00:59:27.080 regardless of my beliefs. 1296 00:59:27.400 --> 00:59:32.160 Do you...what do you see as possibilities for... 1297 00:59:32.160 --> 00:59:34.120 in terms of electronic democracy? 1298 00:59:34.540 --> 00:59:37.060 Because as we're becoming increasingly individualised, 1299 00:59:37.180 --> 00:59:40.840 what opportunity is there for individuals or groups of individuals 1300 00:59:40.840 --> 00:59:44.120 to empower themselves to be able to make their work 1301 00:59:44.120 --> 00:59:46.300 or to find out what their work actually is? 1302 00:59:48.700 --> 00:59:51.220 I don't know that we're becoming individualised 1303 00:59:51.220 --> 00:59:54.580 so much as we're being freed from compulsory community 1304 00:59:54.580 --> 00:59:58.780 and we're able to join communities of selection. 1305 00:59:59.020 --> 01:00:02.200 So we're freed from compulsory communities of... 1306 01:00:02.200 --> 01:00:04.380 particularly ethnicity and religion. 1307 01:00:04.460 --> 01:00:06.660 And if you look at, you know, the sort of... 1308 01:00:07.180 --> 01:00:10.160 the blind sectarianism of Australian culture of 40 years ago, 1309 01:00:10.240 --> 01:00:11.340 it's just not something that... 1310 01:00:11.340 --> 01:00:14.540 People talk about the good old days when everybody belonged to a community. 1311 01:00:14.740 --> 01:00:16.020 And it's like, yeah, in that community, 1312 01:00:16.080 --> 01:00:19.600 you'll gossip behind each other's back and say evil, nasty things and... 1313 01:00:20.180 --> 01:00:22.080 You know, and so on. 1314 01:00:22.180 --> 01:00:24.520 So I don't see much to go back to in that regard. 1315 01:00:24.980 --> 01:00:28.600 But, yes, it's possible to use communication tools 1316 01:00:28.600 --> 01:00:32.420 to create communities of choice rather than communities of necessity. 1317 01:00:32.980 --> 01:00:37.160 The trouble is that people who aren't good at community probably benefited from it, 1318 01:00:37.160 --> 01:00:37.280 but they don't get to do it. 1319 01:00:37.280 --> 01:00:37.860 And that's the problem with the compulsory community, 1320 01:00:38.120 --> 01:00:39.820 because you just belonged, you know, 1321 01:00:39.820 --> 01:00:41.820 and then those people actually get left out 1322 01:00:41.820 --> 01:00:46.220 because they actually don't have the skill to partake voluntarily. 1323 01:00:46.540 --> 01:00:48.920 So that's something that I think education needs to address, 1324 01:00:49.140 --> 01:00:50.740 is how do you equip people with the capacity 1325 01:00:50.740 --> 01:00:54.580 not just to compete on a maths test but to have a conversation? 1326 01:00:54.920 --> 01:00:55.880 You know, it's amazing... 1327 01:00:55.880 --> 01:00:58.340 You know, how many eight-year-olds have ever asked the question, 1328 01:00:58.480 --> 01:00:59.260 you know, what did you do today? 1329 01:00:59.400 --> 01:01:00.300 And the answer is always, nothing. 1330 01:01:00.980 --> 01:01:04.380 You know, and it's like, right, how did we have this conversation? 1331 01:01:04.380 --> 01:01:07.020 And it takes this incredible skill to draw it out. 1332 01:01:07.100 --> 01:01:10.200 But, of course, you know, people often go through life 1333 01:01:10.200 --> 01:01:11.720 with that sort of eight-year-old sense. 1334 01:01:11.820 --> 01:01:13.440 When you're asked a question, the answer is, nothing. 1335 01:01:13.760 --> 01:01:15.620 You know, and hence our conversation starts. 1336 01:01:16.080 --> 01:01:17.840 And so the tools are great for that. 1337 01:01:17.900 --> 01:01:20.600 I don't see why face-to-face communication 1338 01:01:20.600 --> 01:01:23.000 is necessarily better or privileged. 1339 01:01:23.020 --> 01:01:24.500 It is for some people, but not for everybody. 1340 01:01:25.040 --> 01:01:25.720 Some people are... 1341 01:01:26.380 --> 01:01:28.620 Some people's lives are enhanced by being able to communicate 1342 01:01:28.620 --> 01:01:30.540 where people can't see them or can't hear them. 1343 01:01:30.980 --> 01:01:33.020 Deaf people, for example, will often tell you 1344 01:01:33.020 --> 01:01:34.360 how much the internet's been a problem 1345 01:01:34.380 --> 01:01:35.100 and how much it's been a boon in that regard. 1346 01:01:37.280 --> 01:01:40.520 It reminds me of Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1347 01:01:40.660 --> 01:01:43.760 where he was completely unable to describe what he did to his child. 1348 01:01:44.000 --> 01:01:45.420 He had a real crisis of conscience about it. 1349 01:01:45.740 --> 01:01:49.900 But electronic democracy, I mean, I'm interested in some ideas. 1350 01:01:50.100 --> 01:01:51.700 I'm not sure if it's getting at what you're at, 1351 01:01:51.760 --> 01:01:55.000 about the ability for it to be a tool for worker mobilisation. 1352 01:01:55.500 --> 01:01:58.560 And we've seen the collapse of the first attempt 1353 01:01:58.560 --> 01:02:00.740 to put forward a multilateral agreement on investment, 1354 01:02:01.080 --> 01:02:04.240 and a lot of that's allegedly due to people 1355 01:02:04.240 --> 01:02:04.360 who are not interested in it. 1356 01:02:04.380 --> 01:02:06.000 People forming virtual discussion groups 1357 01:02:06.000 --> 01:02:08.000 and using that as a tool to combat things. 1358 01:02:08.240 --> 01:02:10.540 And we're also witnessing things like electronic strikes, 1359 01:02:12.380 --> 01:02:16.360 where, for example, there's a big dispute taking place in Quebec at the moment 1360 01:02:16.360 --> 01:02:18.740 where the Quebec government is attacking the nurses, 1361 01:02:19.380 --> 01:02:22.700 and workers from all over the world are being asked to send emails 1362 01:02:22.700 --> 01:02:26.800 to bring down the Quebec government's computing system and so forth. 1363 01:02:29.740 --> 01:02:31.160 I used to... 1364 01:02:31.160 --> 01:02:32.980 In the 60s, in the mid-60s, 1365 01:02:32.980 --> 01:02:36.660 I was an advocate of something that people laughed at a great deal, 1366 01:02:36.780 --> 01:02:39.860 which was, I suppose, an electronic plebiscite, 1367 01:02:40.440 --> 01:02:43.140 which I imagined, you know, in the remote future, 1368 01:02:43.240 --> 01:02:44.960 in the 80s or the 90s, you know, 1369 01:02:44.980 --> 01:02:46.720 people would have these things called computers, 1370 01:02:47.320 --> 01:02:50.780 and, you know, you'd be able to communicate with people around the world, 1371 01:02:50.820 --> 01:02:53.860 and within your own culture, you'd be able to register your vote 1372 01:02:53.860 --> 01:02:55.840 on all sorts of interesting issues as they came up, 1373 01:02:55.900 --> 01:02:59.860 and the politicians would therefore know what the opinion of the masses was, 1374 01:02:59.940 --> 01:03:02.620 and they'd, you know, work out how to fool them. 1375 01:03:03.580 --> 01:03:04.780 The more readily... 1376 01:03:04.780 --> 01:03:07.680 And, in fact, of course, that's more or less what's happened by other means. 1377 01:03:07.780 --> 01:03:12.080 We don't, in fact, have to sort of hit ten buttons each night 1378 01:03:12.080 --> 01:03:15.440 to give our opinion on, you know, the water reclamation project, 1379 01:03:16.440 --> 01:03:19.580 but we do have all sorts of polling mechanisms 1380 01:03:19.580 --> 01:03:21.600 which are reasonably accurate, you know, and... 1381 01:03:22.200 --> 01:03:23.240 I don't know. 1382 01:03:23.300 --> 01:03:25.520 I mean, now that it's actually starting to happen, 1383 01:03:25.620 --> 01:03:28.060 I'm quite worried about it for several reasons. 1384 01:03:28.160 --> 01:03:28.620 One is that... 1385 01:03:29.580 --> 01:03:31.180 I mean, the sorts of things when people say, 1386 01:03:31.260 --> 01:03:32.600 oh, my God, this politician is... 1387 01:03:32.620 --> 01:03:35.660 is just, you know, being blown around by the gales of opinion, 1388 01:03:35.820 --> 01:03:37.420 you know, they're just responding... 1389 01:03:37.420 --> 01:03:38.760 They're not principled, you know. 1390 01:03:38.780 --> 01:03:40.440 They're responding to what people want, 1391 01:03:40.500 --> 01:03:42.020 and I think, that's rather odd, isn't it? 1392 01:03:42.040 --> 01:03:42.660 You know, in a democracy? 1393 01:03:43.380 --> 01:03:44.100 How awful! 1394 01:03:45.600 --> 01:03:47.820 But, I mean, that does speak to part of what we expect. 1395 01:03:48.020 --> 01:03:49.780 You know, we live in a representative democracy, 1396 01:03:49.940 --> 01:03:50.780 not a direct democracy, 1397 01:03:50.940 --> 01:03:54.880 so we do expect to have the ability to, in our stupidity, 1398 01:03:54.880 --> 01:03:56.320 sort of blunder around and pick people 1399 01:03:56.320 --> 01:03:58.620 who are actually more articulate and cleverer than we are 1400 01:03:58.620 --> 01:04:01.660 so that they can kind of lead us in the right direction, 1401 01:04:01.660 --> 01:04:03.420 and that is part of our tradition. 1402 01:04:04.120 --> 01:04:05.800 And, you know, the other part is... 1403 01:04:05.800 --> 01:04:09.480 The downside of that is the sort of fear which I actually do have, 1404 01:04:09.560 --> 01:04:12.200 although I think I'm an anarchist until it actually comes to it, 1405 01:04:12.680 --> 01:04:16.140 that, you know, a lot of people are very stupid and very ignorant 1406 01:04:16.140 --> 01:04:18.100 and they couldn't give a shit, you know? 1407 01:04:19.260 --> 01:04:20.900 So, do you want to hear their opinion? 1408 01:04:21.080 --> 01:04:23.960 It might be better to have the sort of situation that we've got now 1409 01:04:23.960 --> 01:04:26.500 where they cancel each other out by their silence. 1410 01:04:30.320 --> 01:04:30.720 I... 1411 01:04:30.720 --> 01:04:33.740 It should be put out, democracy is not all sweetness and light. 1412 01:04:33.840 --> 01:04:35.320 I mean, the most effective political party 1413 01:04:35.320 --> 01:04:38.420 that uses the internet in Australia is One Nation, without a doubt. 1414 01:04:38.680 --> 01:04:38.880 Exactly. 1415 01:04:40.060 --> 01:04:43.260 OK, we've been doing a lot of thinking for a long time, 1416 01:04:43.320 --> 01:04:45.300 so I think we might make this the very last question 1417 01:04:45.300 --> 01:04:47.080 and hope that it's a dead easy one. 1418 01:04:47.340 --> 01:04:47.780 Sir? 1419 01:04:48.920 --> 01:04:49.360 The... 1420 01:04:50.520 --> 01:04:52.220 The situation that I've seen, 1421 01:04:53.300 --> 01:04:56.700 being one that has actually worked with computers, on computers, 1422 01:04:56.900 --> 01:04:57.980 all my life, 1423 01:04:59.480 --> 01:05:00.700 and we've been told that... 1424 01:05:00.720 --> 01:05:01.660 There was going to be a paperless office, 1425 01:05:01.780 --> 01:05:03.160 but in fact we're using more paper. 1426 01:05:05.440 --> 01:05:07.220 Eventually, that is the baby boomer manager 1427 01:05:07.220 --> 01:05:10.280 who is asking his secretary to print out his email so he can read it. 1428 01:05:10.760 --> 01:05:11.580 But that's... 1429 01:05:11.580 --> 01:05:14.560 Yeah, hopefully that is going to die, as was suggested earlier. 1430 01:05:16.860 --> 01:05:20.260 But what we're finding is that instead of working less, 1431 01:05:20.860 --> 01:05:26.440 we're working more because we can now produce better quality. 1432 01:05:26.880 --> 01:05:29.840 It used to be that we printed up a typed page, 1433 01:05:29.840 --> 01:05:31.660 had a couple of errors in it, that was good enough, 1434 01:05:31.900 --> 01:05:33.580 because it's so hard to do it again. 1435 01:05:34.220 --> 01:05:36.020 Today, we can put it in the word processor, 1436 01:05:36.220 --> 01:05:39.480 move whole paragraphs around and produce a perfect document, 1437 01:05:39.620 --> 01:05:41.640 take the same amount of time, maybe even more. 1438 01:05:43.200 --> 01:05:44.680 Where do we... 1439 01:05:45.560 --> 01:05:47.220 Is that going to change? 1440 01:05:47.520 --> 01:05:50.680 Are we going to just have the same amount of work available 1441 01:05:50.680 --> 01:05:55.200 because we're going to want it to be a thousand times better, 1442 01:05:55.340 --> 01:05:56.060 a better quality? 1443 01:05:56.380 --> 01:05:59.200 I know that to some extent, quite obviously, some of... 1444 01:05:59.200 --> 01:06:01.380 No, part of my answer is going to be 1445 01:06:01.380 --> 01:06:04.400 that the manufacturing industries just can't get any better. 1446 01:06:05.720 --> 01:06:07.760 As they get better, just by definition, 1447 01:06:07.880 --> 01:06:09.660 there's not going to be enough people going around. 1448 01:06:09.780 --> 01:06:11.400 But I'll try to let you answer it. 1449 01:06:11.800 --> 01:06:15.580 Perhaps you've seen that TV commercial for a brand of colour printer 1450 01:06:15.580 --> 01:06:17.640 where a bunch of people hover around, you know, 1451 01:06:17.660 --> 01:06:18.940 like the deadline is looming. 1452 01:06:19.020 --> 01:06:21.340 It's like, does the comma go in? No, don't put the comma in. 1453 01:06:21.380 --> 01:06:23.180 Put the comma in! They put the comma in, you know, 1454 01:06:23.180 --> 01:06:25.180 and they print it out instantly on this beautiful new printer. 1455 01:06:25.300 --> 01:06:26.880 And another workmate comes over and says, 1456 01:06:27.060 --> 01:06:28.480 you put the comma in the wrong place! 1457 01:06:28.480 --> 01:06:30.620 And I'm sort of thinking, I'd rather be in a workplace 1458 01:06:30.620 --> 01:06:32.940 where people sort of go, should the comma go there? 1459 01:06:33.060 --> 01:06:34.520 It's like, no, bugger it, just print it. 1460 01:06:34.800 --> 01:06:35.240 You know? 1461 01:06:35.660 --> 01:06:37.040 So, in a sense... 1462 01:06:38.840 --> 01:06:41.160 ..by sort of, you know, infinitely raising the threshold 1463 01:06:41.160 --> 01:06:46.860 of what qualifies as, let's face it, useless attempts at quality, 1464 01:06:47.040 --> 01:06:48.740 because, let's face it, the document's going to be thrown away 1465 01:06:48.740 --> 01:06:50.220 after the presentation or whatever, 1466 01:06:51.040 --> 01:06:52.420 one creates a useless work 1467 01:06:52.420 --> 01:06:54.920 and one is sucked further and further into the vortex 1468 01:06:54.920 --> 01:06:56.160 of the abolition of leisure, 1469 01:06:56.740 --> 01:06:58.460 which I think would be a terrible path to go down 1470 01:06:58.480 --> 01:07:00.480 because I see no necessity for work at all. 1471 01:07:00.580 --> 01:07:01.980 It's something that we should struggle to overcome. 1472 01:07:02.340 --> 01:07:02.840 Hear, hear. 1473 01:07:09.000 --> 01:07:12.000 Well, on that note, I think I shall thank all our guests.