All posts by Paul Raven

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ProtoTXTSPK

Via Chairman Bruce, another piece of ammunition against the Rejectionistas who rely on the old “digital messaging is destroying language through compression and abbreviation and slang!” canard; turns out telegraph operators of the 1890s were rockin’ the txtspk to save on time and limited characterspace:

In their conversations telegraphers use a system of abbreviations which enables them to say considerably more in a certain period of time then they otherwise could. Their morning greeting to a friend in a distant city is usually “g. m.,” and the farewell for the evening, “g. n.,” the letters of course standing for good morning and good night. The salutation may be accompanied by an inquiry by one as to the health of the other, which would be expressed thus: “Hw r u ts mng?” And the answer would be: “I’m pty wl; hw r u?” or “I’m nt flg vy wl; fraid I’ve gt t mlaria.”

By the time these courtesies have taken place some early messages have come from the receiving department or from some other wire, and the man before whom they are placed says to his friend many miles away: “Wl hrs a fu; Gol hang ts everlastin grind. I wish I ws rich.” And the other man says: “No rest fo t wickd, min pen,” the last two words indicating that he wants the sender to wait a minute while he adjusts and tests his pen. Presently he clicks out “g a,” meaning “go ahead,” and the day’s work has begun.

This just in: civilisation still standing after ~120 years of convenience-based linguistic innovation.

[ Well, OK, civilisation’s looking to be on rocky ground right now, but you can’t lay our economic problems at the feet of ppl usn abbrvs. y, u mad? ]

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Rocket Science: anthology open to submissions

Heads up, writers – I bring news from ian Sales. The Rocket Science anthology reading period is now open, so get yer subs in! Take it away, Ian:

Rocket Science, the anthology of authentic and realistic hard science fiction, opens its doors today to submissions. I’m looking for stories which realistically depict space travel and its hazards. But not exclusively: stories covering other areas of science and technology are welcome. Just as long as they are authentic and realistic.

Both fiction and non-fiction are wanted – between 1,000 and 6,000 words. Payment is GBP 10.00 per 1,000 words. See the guidelines page at Mutation Press and the antho’s own news blog for further information.

Well, you heard the man – get to it! I’ve got a couple of pieces in mind of my own, but – as usual – they have yet to be written. Better get a move on, hadn’t I?

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Foxconn’s robot recruitment drive: the beginning of the end of labour?

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Alex Knapp picks up on the story about Foxconn’s plans to draft in a cool million robots for their manufacturing plants within three years, and ponders whether this is good news for the unemployed in the West:

A good portion of this move to robotics labor has, no doubt, to do with labor costs and the reports of working conditions in FoxConn’s factories in China. I do wonder, however, what this means for the future of outsourcing to Asian markets, though. If labor costs can be reduced by employing more robots in the factory, and if its feasible for a company like FoxConn to use such a large number, it begs the question of why Western companies might continue outsourcing.

One of the major reasons, after all, that companies are outsourcing their operations to Asia is for the labor costs. If those labor costs can be obviated by greater automation, then other considerations come into play. After all, America and Europe are still where most of the customers are, and with the price of oil on the rise, cheaper transportation costs might come into the mix. Moreover, with both Europe and the United States teetering on the brink of another double-dip recession, policies geared towards bringing manufacturing home via tax incentives and other measures are more likely to become law.

Hmm. Even allowing for the traditional hyperbole of corporate press releases, a million automated machines will displace a whole lot of jobs. But Knapp is far more confident than I am about governmental willingness to pass laws that make demands of their corporate paymasters, let alone ones they’d actually be obliged to adhere to; the geographically-bound nation-state has no leverage on the transnational corporation, and the only incentive you can offer them is a taxation low-ball and further erosion of worker’s rights. In other words, sure, you might get manufacturing returning to the West, but it’ll only happen because labour costs have equalised… and that’s only going to happen in places where you’ve carefully created a huge stock of labour that doesn’t have any other options. Sweatshop USA… it’s a sign of how bad things are if you can count that as a victory condition.

And to extrapolate further, the rapid maturing of fabrication technology is going to obsolete a lot of more complex machinist gigs, too. They may well be countering fabbers and sinterers among the Foxconn “robot” list, of course, though the article mentions more simple stuff – welding, spraying, low-level assembly, which are exactly the sorts of jobs that robots have traditionally obsoleted before. I watched pick’n’place machines and surface mount technology completely gut the electronics assembly industry here in the UK back in the nineties, and less than a decade ago it was already cheaper for one company I know of to source components internationally, ship them to the UK for collation, ship them out to Thailand for assembly and then back again for QA and (extensive) rework, than it was to pay UK workers to do the full process locally. That sort of price margin isn’t going to be significantly eroded by concessionary tax rates, though increased transportation costs will admittedly contribute as well.

I think if there’s anything to take away from this inexorable slide toward nigh-total automation, it’s that we can no longer sustain a global economy that relies on mass employment in the manufacturing industry to keep the money moving. I suspect there’s a tipping point in the near future (or possibly in the recent past) at which – barring existential-scale disasters that knock us back into pre-industrial ways of life – it will never again be cheaper to get humans to build things than it is to get machines to do the same work.

What happens after that point to the business models of tchotchke makers and Next Big Thing gadget creation, I have no idea… and the more economists and politicians I listen to, the more I suspect that no one else has a bloody clue either. If anyone can show me how this *isn’t* a big old zero-sum game that’s going to hit a brick wall sometime soon, please pipe up and do so.

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Could Africa feed the world?

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Those of you of a similar age to myself will almost certainly remember a song about feeding the world; part of the world that needed feeding at the time was sub-Saharan Africa, and sadly that is still the case in some locations (as well as in places on other continents). But is it possible that Africa could feed not only itself but the rest of the world as well? Kanayo Nwanze, the president of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, seems to think it can:

Nwanze drew a sharp contrast between Gansu province, in northwest China, and parts of Africa that cannot feed itself. He said like many parts of the world, Gansu suffers from frequent drought, limited water for irrigation and severe soil erosion. Yet despite the weather and the harsh environment, the farmers in the Gansu programme area are feeding themselves and increasing their incomes.

“I met one farmer whose income had risen from only $2 (£1.20) a day in 2006 to $35 a day last year,” he exclaimed.

So when asked why this could be done in China but not Africa, Nwanze said the vital difference was government policy.

“What I saw in Gansu was the result of government policy to invest in rural areas and to reduce the gap between the rural and the urban and stem migration,” he said in a telephone interview. “It has a very harsh environment, it has only 300 millimetres of rain annually, compared to parts of the Sahel which gets 400-600 millimetres, but the government has invested in roads and electricity. We found a community willing to transform their lives by harvesting rainwater, using biogas, terracing mountain slopes. There are crops for livestock, they are growing vegetables, wheat and maize, and generating income that allows them to build resilience.”

While Somalia is a worst-case scenario, Nwanze continues, in Ethiopia and Djibouti there has been a lack of long-term investment that makes them vulnerable to climate change. “It is not enough to wait for crisis to turn to disaster to act. The rains will fail again, but governments have not invested in the ability of populations to resist drought.”

Nwanze argues that Africa is facing the fallout of decades of neglecting agriculture, a fault that lies with African governments and aid donors.

Mismanagement and climate change to blame, rather than some fundamental property of the continent itself? A Chinese province used as an exemplar of rural land development? Unthinkable! These are backward nations, desperately in need of the guiding hand of corporate capitalism and parliamentary democracy! </sarcasm>

I rather like imagining a future where Africa becomes an arable breadbasket with an economic boom based on mobile and wireless technologies. After all, it’s not looking any less likely than the so-called First World pulling its collective finger out of the arse of the investment banking sector, now is it?

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Got 99 metaproblems (but a lack of aspirational futurism ain’t one)

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Good grief, but the RSS mountain really piles up in 24 hours, doesn’t it?

Well, mine does, anyway… which means it’s probably high time I had a spring-clean in there to make it more manageable. As well as maybe, y’know, stopping the habit of adding more feeds to the damned aggregator all the time. There’s too much interesting stuff (or grim stuff, or grimly interesting stuff) going on in the world, y’see; the temptation to stay on top of it all and let it just flow through my head like some sort of Zeitgeist/sewer-outflow hybrid is horribly compelling. I am the gauzy mesh in your perpetual flow of present history, plucking out interesting lumps of… no, actually, let’s stop that metaphor right there.

Anyways, long story short: had a busy few days and have more busyness ahead, so minimal commentary from me today. Instead, an exhortation to go and read stuff written by other folk far smarter than I. We’ll start with the manageably short piece, which is another Karl Schroeder joint at Chateau Stross (or should that be Schloss Stross?) where he talks about the difference between foresight futurism and “predicting the future”, and a new aspirational direction for his near-future science fiction output that is reminiscent of Jetse de Vries’ Optimistic SF manifesto:

… I’m pretty tired of all those, “Dude, where’s my flying car!” digs. There’s always been a certain brand of futurist who’s obsessed with getting it right: with racking up successful predictions like some modern-day Nostradamus. I’m sure you know who I’m talking about; some futurists play the prediction game very well, but in the end it is a game, and closer to charlatanism than it is to science. There’s actually no method for seeing the future, and nobody’s predictions are more reliable than anybody else’s.

You know, I think we do know who he’s talking about…

And while we’re thinking about the future, it’s hard to avoid thinking about problems, for – as a species and a planet – we have rather a lot of them right now. So many, in fact, that you might even say that reality itself is a failed state:

So maybe what we have today are not problems, but meta-problems.

It is very useful to confirm our understanding with others, to meet with fellow humans – preferably face-to-face – strength flows from this.

However, disquiet remains – no pre-catastrophic change of course seems in any way likely. What we might call ‘Fabian’ environmentalism has failed.

Occasionally a scientist will be so overcome with horror that he will make a radical public pronouncement – like the drunken uncle at a wedding, he may well be saying what everyone knows to be true, pulling the skeletons out of the family closet for all to see, but, well, it just doesn’t do to say that sort of thing out loud at a formal function.

This is all a little bit strange.

We understand the problems. We also, pretty much, understand the solutions. But their real-world application is a whole unpickable, integrated clusterfuck.

I believe part of the meta-problem is this: people no longer inhabit a single reality.

Collectively, there is no longer a single cultural arena of dialogue.

And we need to construct one. Go read the rest for the full lowdown. I’d love to be able to name the writer as something other than “Steelweaver”, but as he’s using a Tumblr with no About page or anything*, I am largely unable to do so. If you can fill in that datagap for me, please get in touch or leave a note in the comments.

[ * Note to writers of serious and/or interesting stuff on the intetubes: this is rather frustrating, and Tumblr really isn’t the best platform for this sort of stuff. Basically it’s the post-naivete ironic MySpace, optimised for collecting hipster aphorisms and reposting “art” shots that tend to contain boobs.

Just sayin’. ]