--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781786632623" library_document_id: "6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea" source_sha256: "1abf214ba80dbc1c2c27dfbaa4c324d483354085cfb676f2df827d68fa33ed6f" pdf_physical_page_count: 288 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 100 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea?start=100&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=100&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=90&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=110&limit=10" --- # Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=100 | PRINTED_PAGE=91 Arterys, a medical imaging system, reads MRIs of the heart and measures blood flow through its ventricles. The process usually takes a trained professional forty-five minutes, but Arterys can do the same task in around fifteen seconds. Incredibly, it has a self-teaching neural network which constantly adds to its knowledge of how the heart works with each new case it examines. It is in areas such as this where automation will make initial incursions into medicine, boosting productivity by accompanying, rather than replacing, existing workers. Yet such systems will improve with each passing year and some, like ‘godfather of deep learning’ Geofrey Hinton, believe that medical schools will soon stop training radiologists altogether. Perhaps that is presumptuous – after all, we ’d want a level of quality control and maybe even the final diagnosis to involve a human – but even then, this massively upgraded, faster process might need one trained professional where at present there are dozens, resulting in a quicker, superior service that costs less in both time and money. In an ageing society such advantages won’t just be welcome, they’ll be necessary. A similar phenomenon is unfolding with law and legal services – a historically middle-class part of the service economy. According to a 2016 study by the consultancy Deloitte, 114,000 legal jobs in Britain – around 40 per cent of the entire sector – are likely to be automated over the next twenty years. That same study found technology had already eliminated 31,000 jobs in the industry. These tended to be lower-level positions, as intelligent search systems are increasingly preferred to junior lawyers and paralegals in a number of areas, especially those most engaged in repetitive searches or processing extraordinarily large amounts of information. Full Automation 91 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=101 | PRINTED_PAGE=92 If Deloitte is correct, then the more repetitive elements of the legal industry are about to be widely automated. As with medicine it is beyond doubt that some jobs will remain, at least for a generation, but what both examples reveal is that historically white-collar jobs are just as exposed to trends which have already wrought a more obvious impact elsewhere in manufacturing. Even an optimistic view sees sectors leading to net job creation as few and far between. Geriatric care – which combines high levels of fine motor coordination with afective labour and ongoing risk management – is one; after all, societies around the world will be afected by ageing populations over the course of the twenty-first century. Health and education generally will remain labour-intensive and, at the very least, will take longer to disappear. Even with these growth areas in mind, however, the overall picture of job losses due to automation makes standing still seem wildly optimistic. The Future of Work Not everyone agrees that progress will lead to peak human in the Third Disruption as the steam engine and fossil fuels led to peak horse in the Second. Indeed, two of the leading voices in the field of work and technological change, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, believe value will instead increasingly derive from the generation of new ideas. So while anything repetitive may well be automated or significantly augmented by machines, the uniquely human skills of creativity and emotional connection will underpin the jobs of tomorrow. This may well prove the case in some areas but surely not for a world of nearly 10 billion people. No doubt some new professions will expand – like solar cell engineer and wind turbine technician – while uniquely creative vocations, like chef or interior designer, will abide longer than others. But these can’t compare to driver, cashier or construction worker in terms of the historic volume of work they create. Given the evidence from the last century, such a prospect would appear remote. 92 n e w t r av e l l e r s ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=102 | PRINTED_PAGE=93 What seems more likely is that just as peak horse took more than a century to unfold after the arrival of Watt’s steam engine a similar transition, uneven and intermittent, is presently underway. Now, just as in London in 1894, we must grasp the opportunities of the new world, rather than dwell on those technologies and social mores which are falling into the slipstream of history. Full Automation 93 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=103 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy It never ceases to amaze me how PV costs keep coming down … it is unparalleled in the history of energy use to have a source keep getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper year on year not by single-digit, but by double-digit gains. Danny Kennedy, managing director of the California Clean Energy Fund Energy and Disruption Energy and its various sources profoundly shaped the First and Second Disruptions. As hunter-gatherers our means of survival were our own bodies, and we used them to create tools and source food. We inhabited a world without much technology, with the large brains of our ancestors mainly employed for complex spoken communication. Forms of concentrated energy, characteristic of societies capable of generating mass surplus, remained minimal. That changed 12,000 years ago with the arrival of agriculture. Now humans began to domesticate other animals, breeding them not just for meat, skins and fur, but also their ability to perform tasks. This led to a major surge in productivity, making sedentary and increasingly sophisticated societies possible. One consequence of that complexity was the emergence of human slavery, a significant basis for social hierarchy and economic production during antiquity. These biological sources of energy – human and non-human – were later joined by technologies constructed around the elements, with the water and windmill increasingly common sights across Europe a thousand years ago. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=104 | PRINTED_PAGE=95 Yet all of these innovations, both social and technological, were limited by their dependence on nature: the location and number of mills was determined by the availability of water and wind, while animals and humans were often unreliable and themselves dificult to maintain. While, by the early Renaissance, major advances were observable in fields such as printing, astronomy and navigation, methods of transport – as well as means of artificial light and heat – remained much the same as a thousand years earlier. While sixteenth-century Florence – the cradle of the European Renaissance – is upheld in the popular imagination as the embodiment of cultural refinement, when Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his Discorsi on the histories of Livy the world he inhabited difered surprisingly little to that of his first-century hero. Towards the end of the eighteenth century this changed dramatically. The arrival of Watt’s steam engine quickly provided an abundant supply of eficient, reliable power, in turn giving rise to novel industrial practices and patterns of consumption. While much is made of this being a technological and economic transformation – and it was – it also represented a rupture in energy. From now on, industrialising economies would depend on fossil fuels. While most of the consequences unleashed by all of this in culture, science and politics were apparent to anyone who lived through it, perhaps the most important after-efect would remain hidden for another two centuries. Industrial capitalism, whose immense powers were made possible by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, would change the Earth’s ecosystems. For the first time in billions of years, the activity of a single species would become the leading factor in our planet’s ability to sustain life. Limitless Power 95 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=105 | PRINTED_PAGE=96 Arrival of the Anthropocene While the precise environmental consequences of the Second Disruption are unclear, the scientific consensus indicates that higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, have caused global temperatures to rise. As a result the world is 0.8 degrees centigrade warmer today than it was in the 1880s. Because there is a delay between atmospheric composition and climate change, future warming is inevitable simply by virtue of past action. Furthermore, emissions of these gases have never been higher, meaning our world will proceed to get much warmer still – the key question being how much and how quickly. And therein lies the problem with the politics of climate change. While we can be certain it is happening, almost everything else is speculation. Informed opinion agrees that global temperatures will rise by at least a further two degrees as a delayed response to present conditions. What remains unknown, however, is the time frame within which that will unfold as well as the precise consequences of such change – be it extreme weather events, rising sea levels or desertification. Which means it is almost equally plausible that the world will warm by two degrees over the next several decades or centuries. In the context of the Earth being more than 4 billion years old such a diference is so small as to be the margin of error. For the human mind, however, and by extension the politics of global warming, it is everything. Any prediction that is deemed ‘inaccurate ’ is a weapon for vested interests to discredit the notion of global warming altogether. 96 n e w t r av e l l e r s ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=106 | PRINTED_PAGE=97 This is absurd when considering climate change not only as a political challenge, but an existential threat to our species. Even if warming remained below two degrees – something viewed as increasingly unlikely – it would represent an almost indescribable disaster. Anything beyond that, though, could be cataclysmic, creating a cascade of feedbacks concluding in a world unable to maintain multiple species – including us. Can We Survive Climate Catastrophe? What might such a sequence of events look like? A reasonable template might be the last time our planet was three degrees warmer than today, as it was some 10 million years ago. Then, sea levels were twenty-five metres higher than at present, with continental glaciers entirely absent from the Northern Hemisphere. In this world, much of the Amazon basin would become a desert, and the glaciers which provide drinking water for much of China and the Indian subcontinent would all but disappear. The southern belt of the United States, countries bordering the Mediterranean – not to mention the Middle East, Australia and much of Africa – would become too hot to sustain their present populations. Alongside all of this, there would be a major rise in extreme weather events and a profound disturbance to the hydrological cycle. Here ‘once in a century’ weather events would be happening all of the time, with the previously extreme becoming routine. In this respect the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season with Hurricanes Irma and Harvey in particular, not to mention the sweltering summer of the following year, provide a glimpse of the future. Limitless Power 97 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=107 | PRINTED_PAGE=98 Even this isn’t the worst-case scenario, however. An Earth six degrees warmer than today would have sea levels as much as 200 metres higher than they presently are with the oceans themselves too warm to sustain much life. This world would be almost entirely covered by desert, with only today’s polar regions capable of supporting extensive agriculture. Yet even all of these challenges would be trivial compared to the real game-changer: substantially increased levels of atmospheric methane. In that event, anything with lungs would struggle to breathe. The good news is we can still avoid much of this. Indeed, we may even be able to reverse some of the damage we ’ve already caused, thereby undoing changes which at present appear inevitable. It won’t be easy, however, and will require a global transition away from fossil fuels over the next two decades. Yet if humanity can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least 85 per cent by 2050 that should stabilise atmospheric levels at around 400 parts per million (ppm) – slightly above those of today but enough to steer clear of runaway catastrophe. The bad news is that while we know what needs to be done, that’s been the case for the last twenty-five years – and we ’ve only gone backwards. The Rio Earth Summit, held in 1992, was the moment climate change became a story of global significance. Yet CO levels were 61 per cent higher in 2013 than they were in 1990, with the years following the 2008 crisis recording the highest annual increases in history. Properly understood, our present course isn’t one of inaction, it’s rushing full speed to oblivion. 98 n e w t r av e l l e r s ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=108 | PRINTED_PAGE=99 Energy Wants to Be Free Right now, the world’s human population consumes seventeen to eighteen terawatts of energy every hour, approximately 150,000 terawatt Hours (TwH) per year. While not evenly distributed by any measure, that means the average person is using about two kilowatts of constant energy, more or less the same as having a kettle switched on all of the time. Over the next three decades those figures will substantially increase. The UN expects the world’s population to rise to 9.7 billion by 2050, 2 billion more than today, with almost all of that increase coming from the poorer countries of the Global South. What is more these populations will increasingly consume energy, for heating, transport, home appliances and holidays, on par with the Global North. Switching the present global economy to renewables seems an immense task on its own, but the reality is even harder: we ’ll have to decarbonise a planet that uses twice as much energy as we do right now. It is not all bad news, however. While increased energy consumption has correlated with economic growth for the last two centuries, demand for energy in the world’s richest countries has started to decline over recent years. In the UK for instance, energy consumption peaked at the turn of the millennium, and has fallen by 2 per cent every year since. This means that despite higher living standards and a larger population, Britain’s energy use in 2018 is actually lower than it was in 1970 – this in a country far from energy poor. Right now each person in Britain is consuming around three kilowatts of energy constantly, 50 per cent more than the global average. While the UK’s decline on this measure is more dramatic than anywhere else, it reflects the rule rather than the exception. European countries recorded an 8 per cent reduction in energy consumption between 2005 and 2013, while the US saw a fall of 6 per cent in the eight years to 2012. While the global relocation of manufacturing during the last forty years explains these changes to some extent, it is clear they are primarily a consequence of increased energy eficiency. It seems that just as with population growth, developed economies experience a ceiling in regard to energy consumption. Limitless Power 99 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=109 | PRINTED_PAGE=100 In light of these two facts – substantially increased consumption and a ceiling once a certain level of development is reached – it seems reasonable to use the per capita demand of the UK today as a template for the rest of the world in two decades. If anything, this is overly conservative – after all Britain is a comparatively wealthy country with a high standard of living and relatively cold climate. A world two decades from now with 9 billion people, where each person uses the same energy as the average Brit does at present, would mean constant global consumption of around thirty terawatts of energy – 290,000 TwH a year, slightly less than double what it is right now. While this forecast is higher than predictions elsewhere (British Petroleum foresee global demand of twenty-three terawatts by 2035), being generous with projections makes sense. Any transition to renewables should not be viewed as needing less energy than at present. After all, if we are serious about making a transition suficiently quickly to prevent catastrophic warming, a large margin of error matters. Of paramount importance is that decarbonisation start immediately. In 2017 the International Energy Agency announced the beginning of ‘decade zero’, saying that if a global transition away from fossil fuels didn’t start over the next ten years, warming beyond two degrees would become close to certain. The following year the IPCC repeated those sentiments, concluding wide-scale decarbonisation had to begin before 2030 to avoid ‘catastrophic’ climate change in excess of 1.5 degrees centigrade. 100 n e w t r av e l l e r s 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=110&limit=10)