I'm 81. I'd like to hang around and see if Ray Kurzweil is right on the immortality issue--but since the 'Singularity' is not scheduled to appear until 2045 I don't fancy my chances. Lots of people lose their nerve at 81 and start going back to Church. Not me. (Not yet, anyway) but this seems like a good time for a prudent atheist to consider agnosticism. And if it's still too early to confess my sins, it might not hurt to acknowledge some inadequacies: for example, my complete ignorance of Economics.
I took '101' (of course) and bought that book with the diagrams wherein triumphal arcs of 'desire' intersected catenary droops of 'fulfillment'. (I haven't checked: maybe the diagrams were called 'demand and supply', or possibly, 'lust and disappointment'. It doesn't matter, I gave the author credit for his tragic insight: the intersection invariably happened below and to the left of where one might wish.)
This book (known as 'Samuelson') was written by an undoubted genius. While I failed to understand Economics, I admired his skill in persuading innocent liberal artists (no doubt dazzled by those charts and numbers) that Economics was a science. Its truths might have been dismal, compared to the windows of Notre Dame, but we believed that their validity was in direct proportion to their dreariness. Samuelson's real genius was sales, for although 'Samuelson' (the book) was considered the 'gradus ad parnassum' of Economics (an infallible 'Guide to the Perplexed') oddly enough, it wasn't Eternal. Annual revision was required, perhaps to prevent college students from buying used copies.
At 19 I was a glowering skeptic when it came to revelations--but that wasn't the main cause of my failure to understand Economics. I blame my room-mates, Goldberg and Hart. Sixty-two years ago they were (and still remain) excellent fellows, but they kept me up late nearly every night, to talk about life, and women, and such stuff, so (whether or not I made it to class at eight o'clock) I was usually asleep when the professor held forth, and (again because of Goldberg and Hart) I hadn't really studied the assignment. Sure... I read it--but it was so god-awful boring, I was hoping I'd catch the drift of it from the lecture (assuming I was there.)
Happily, we are gradually overcoming the tragic disjuncture of supply and demand. There is a whole new economics out there, wherein they are not opposed, but convergent. It will be like the USS Enterprise, where Captain Kirk ordered coffee from the computer/synthesizer, and Mr. Spock ordered whatever Vulcans drink (drank? drunk? depending on their location on the space-time continuum) and their orders are (were, will be) instantly, infallibly synthesized from ambient protons... or whatever. Presto!
We aren't there yet, and I may not make it, but it's where we're heading. Already I see riders waving their phones at the bus driver in lieu of tokens. There are Whole Foods stores where you can clear check-out with a smile--no need to wave your phone, as long as it's in your pocket. Soon, maybe, no pockets. Who needs 'em with a chip imbedded in your scapula, like Lassie? Just magical!
Beyond this, on the near horizon, is that happy day when all the costly and troublesome links in the supply chain will be eliminated. There won't be any drivers on those buses, but who cares--nobody will be going to an actual store. Poof! Check-out clerks, farmers, ranchers, fisher-people (or any kind of people, really) processors, packagers, long-haul truck drivers, you name it, all the costly delays and annoyances between wish and fulfillment, will have been eliminated.
There will be downsides, I suppose. Assuming evolution still works our descendants may lose their opposable thumbs (computer games will play themselves.) But it seems a small price to pay, and in time, 'price to pay' will become a curiously outdated, and eventually forgotten, concept.
Never mind Kurzweil's vision, this is the real 'Singularity', the 'now-ness' of everything--the end of Economics as we (well... not me, but you who paid closer attention to 'Samuelson') have always understood it. Oh Brave New World, as Shakespeare, and Aldous Huxley used to say. I wish I could be there when an imagined potato chip simply appeared in one's hand. But wait, why waste time? Why not experience that glorious, salty, crunchy, greasiness directly on the palate?
