# 2026-09-20 - Manna by Marshall Brain
Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future is a 2003 science fiction novel
by Marshall Brain that explores several issues in modern information
technology, automation, and economics, as well as user interfaces and
transhumanism. [1]
# Chapter 1
Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or
inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at
MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in
Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time,
but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting
with its first restaurant in Cary. The Burger-G chain had an attitude
and a style that said "hip" and "fun" to a wide swath of the American
middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based
on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe
Garcia. Over time, Burger-G grew to 1,000 outlets in the U.S. and
showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G
would soon be one of the "Top 5" fast food restaurants in the U.S.
The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked
nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like
C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line
robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the
restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called
"Manna", version 1.0*.
Manna's job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most
interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group
of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal
restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The
people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to
cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees
reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The
managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do
each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early
twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated
in this way.
But the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no
different. The problem was the quality of the fast food experience.
Some restaurants were run perfectly. They had courteous and
thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and
high accuracy on the orders. Other restaurants were chaotic and
uncomfortable to customers. Since one bad experience could turn a
customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed
stores were the Achilles heel of any chain.
To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant
and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to
replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more
controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born.
Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people
were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore
predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the
toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down. The
software was also attached to the time clock, so it knew who was
working in the restaurant. Manna also had "help buttons" throughout
the restaurant. Small signs on the buttons told customers to push
them if they needed help or saw a problem. There was a button in the
restroom that a customer could press if the restroom had a problem.
There was a button on each trashcan. There was a button near each
cash register, one in the kiddie area and so on. These buttons let
customers give Manna a heads up when something went wrong.
At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do.
There were orders coming in from the cash registers, so Manna
directed employees to prepare those meals. There were also toilets to
be scrubbed on a regular basis, floors to mop, tables to wipe,
sidewalks to sweep, buns to defrost, inventory to rotate, windows to
wash and so on. Manna kept track of the hundreds of tasks that needed
to get done, and assigned each task to an employee one at a time.
Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees
each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice
synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone
exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna
micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance.
The software would speak to the employees individually and tell each
one exactly what to do. For example, "Bob, we need to load more
patties. Please walk toward the freezer."
Or, "Jane, when you are through with this customer, please close your
register. Then we will clean the women's restroom."
And so on. The employees were told exactly what to do, and they did
it quite happily. It was a major relief actually, because the
software told them precisely what to do step by step.
For example, when Jane entered the restroom, Manna used a simple
position tracking system built into her headset to know that she had
arrived. Manna then told her the first step.
Manna: "Place the 'wet floor' warning cone outside the door please."
When Jane completed the task, she would speak the word "OK" into her
headset and Manna moved to the next step in the restroom cleaning
procedure.
Manna: "Please block the door open with the door stop."
Jane: "OK."
Manna: "Please retrieve the bucket and mop from the supply closet."
Jane: "OK."
And so on.
Once the restroom was clean, Manna would direct Jane to put
everything away. Manna would make sure that she carefully washed her
hands. Then Manna would immediately start Jane working on a new task.
Meanwhile, Manna might send Lisa to the restroom to inspect it and
make sure that Jane had done a thorough job. Manna would ask Lisa to
check the toilets, the floor, the sink and the mirrors. If Jane
missed anything, Lisa would report it.
I grew up in Cary, NC. That was a long time ago, but when I was a kid
I lived right in the middle of Cary with my parents. My father was a
pilot for a big airline. My mother was a stay-at-home mom and I had a
younger sister. We lived in a typical four bedroom suburban home in a
nice neighborhood with a swimming pool in the backyard. I was a 15
year-old teenager working at the Burger-G on May 17 when the first
Manna system came online.
I can remember putting on the headset for the first time and the
computer talking to me and telling me what to do. It was creepy at
first, but that feeling really only lasted a day or so. Then you were
used to it, and the job really did get easier. Manna never pushed you
around, never yelled at you. The girls liked it because Manna didn't
hit on them either. Manna simply asked you to do something, you did
it, you said, "OK", and Manna asked you to do the next step. Each
step was easy. You could go through the whole day on autopilot, and
Manna made sure that you were constantly doing something. At the end
of the shift Manna always said the same thing. "You are done for
today. Thank you for your help." Then you took off your headset and
put it back on the rack to recharge. The first few minutes off the
headset were always disorienting--there had been this voice in your
head telling you exactly what to do in minute detail for six or eight
hours. You had to turn your brain back on to get out of the
restaurant.
To me, Manna was OK. The job at Burger-G was mindless, and Manna made
it easy by telling you exactly what to do. You could even get Manna
to play music through your headphones, in the background. Manna had a
set of "stations" that you could choose from. That was a bonus. And
Manna kept you busy the entire day. Every single minute, you had
something that Manna was telling you to do. If you simply turned off
your brain and went with the flow of Manna, the day went by very
fast.
My father, on the other hand, did not like Manna at all from the very
first day he saw me wearing the headset in the restaurant. He and Mom
had come in for lunch and to say hi. I knew they were coming, so I
had timed my break so I could sit down with them for a few minutes.
When I sat down, my father noticed the headset.
"So", he said, "they have you working the drive-thru I see. Is that a
step up or a step down?"
"It's not the drive-thru," I replied, "it's a new system they've
installed called Manna. It manages the store."
"How so?"
"It tells me what to do through the headset."
"Who, the manager?"
"No, it's a computer."
He looked at me for a long time, "A computer is telling you what to
do on the job? What does the manager do?"
"The computer is the manager. Manna, manager, get it?"
"You mean that a computer is telling you what to do all day?", he
asked.
"Yeah."
"Like what?"
I gave him an example, "Before you got here, I was taking out the
trash. Manna told me how to do it."
"What did it say?"
"It tells you exactly what to do. Like, It told me to get four new
bags from the rack. When I did that it told me to go to trash can #1.
Once I got there it told me to open the cabinet and pull out the
trash can. Once I did that it told me to check the floor for any
debris. Then it told me to tie up the bag and put it to the side, on
the left. Then it told me to put a new bag in the can. Then it told
me to attach the bag to the rim. Then it told me to put the can back
in and close the cabinet. Then it told me to wipe down the cabinet
and make sure it's spotless. Then it told me to push the help button
on the can to make sure it is working. Then it told me to move to
trash can #2. Like that."
He looked at me for a long time again before he said, "Good Lord, you
are nothing but a piece of a robot. What is it saying to you now?"
"It just told me I have three minutes left on my break. And it told
me to smile and say hello to the guests. How's this? Hi!" And I gave
him a big toothy grin.
"Yesterday the people controlled the computers. Now the computers
control the people. You are the eyes and hands for this robot. And
all so that Joe Garcia can make $20 million per year. Do you know
what will happen if this spreads?"
"No, I don't. And I think Mr. G makes more than $20 million a year.
But right now I've got two minutes left, and Manna is telling me that
I need to move back to station 3 to get ready for the next run. See
ya." I waved at Mom. Dad just stared at me.
The tests in our Burger-G store were surprisingly successful. There
were Burger-G corporate guys in the restaurant watching us, fixing
bugs in the software, making sure Manna was covering all the bases,
and they were pleased. It took about 3 months to work all the kinks
out, and as they did the Manna software totally changed the
restaurant. Worker performance nearly doubled. So did customer
satisfaction. So did the consistency of the customer's experience.
Trash cans never overfilled. Bathrooms were remarkably clean.
Employees always washed their hands when they needed to. Food was
ready faster. The meals we handed out were nearly 100 percent
accurate because Manna made us check to make sure every item in the
bag was exactly what the customer ordered. The store never ran out of
supplies--there were always plenty of napkins in the dispenser and
the ketchup container was always full. There were enough employees in
the store for the busy times, because Manna could accurately track
trends and staff appropriately.
In addition, Burger-G saved a ton of money. Burger-G had hundreds of
stores in the United States. Manna worked so well that Burger-G
deployed it nationwide. Soon Burger-G had cut more than 3,000 of its
higher-paid store employees--mostly assistant managers and managers.
That one change saved the company nearly $100 million per year, and
all that money came straight to the bottom line for the restaurant
chain. Shareholders were ecstatic. Mr. G gave himself another big
raise to celebrate. In addition, Manna had optimized store staffing
and had gotten a significant productivity boost out of the employees
in the store. That saved another $150 million. $250 million made a
huge difference in the fast food industry.
So, the first wave of fast food robots did not replace all of the
burger flipping employees as everyone had expected. The robots
replaced middle management and significantly improved the performance
of minimum wage employees. All of the other fast food chains watched
the Burger-G experiment with Manna closely, and they started
installing Manna systems as well. Soon, nearly every business in
America that had a significant pool of minimum-wage employees was
installing Manna software or something similar. They had to do it in
order to compete.
In other words, Manna spread through the American corporate landscape
like wildfire. And my dad was right. It was when all of these new
Manna systems began talking to each other that things started to get
uncomfortable.
# Chapter 2
Once Burger-G proved that Manna worked, the idea spread like
wildfire. Every restaurant chain used Manna. Every retail store,
whether it was a discount store, a home improvement store, a toy
store, or an office supply store, had Manna systems. You saw people
wearing headsets on construction sites, in airports, at amusement
parks, in hospitals, in movie theaters, at the grocery store... They
were everywhere.
I can remember sitting down one day with my friend Brian at lunch. He
was working at the giant discount supercenter in Raleigh, and they
had just switched over to Manna. He was stunned.
"It doesn't matter if you are a hard worker or a slacker--once you
put on the headset, you are going to be working every minute of the
day or you are gone. The system has already fired five people."
"What's it have you do all day?" There were something like 50 people
working in the supercenter at any given time--it was a 200,000 square
foot store.
"Manna has you moving through the store aisle by aisle. I bet I am
walking six or eight miles a day right now. I am constantly
straightening merchandise on the shelves. Manna knows where I am, and
it knows where everything is on the shelves, so it asks me item by
item to straighten them. Manna wants everything on the shelves
looking perfect. It is also big on restocking. So it will ask me,
'How many rolls of masking tape are on the shelf?' Whenever anything
gets low, it has me go to the back and bring stuff out to the
shelves. It knows what is selling through the cash registers, so it
knows exactly when to restock everything and it makes sure that every
single item in the store is fully stocked."
"That doesn't sound so unusual." I said.
"It's not unusual, except that Manna is telling you exactly what to
do every second of every day. If it asks you to go to the back and
get merchandise, it tells you exactly where to walk to go get it. And
here is the weirdest part--I never see another employee the entire
day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go
for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are
staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at
staggered times. It's like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human
interaction on the job."
"That's spooky. Why would it do that?" I asked.
Brian looked down, "I'm guessing that talking with co-workers wastes
time, and Manna is eliminating the waste everywhere it can."
"What else does it have you doing?" I asked.
"I am constantly checking for spills and other problems in the
aisles--Manna uses us as its eyes to constantly look for problems. I
am also looking for customers in the aisles and asking them how I can
help--customer service is huge to Manna, as long as it takes less
than 30 seconds. And Manna always has us looking for shoplifters. All
day long we are walking back and forth up and down the aisles
straightening things, asking people if they need help and looking for
shoplifters. And like I said, you never run into another employee.
There's no chatting. I never see Amy anymore. Or Kevin. The minute
you put on the headset you are working, and you work alone without
stop until you take the headset off at the end of the shift."
"Shit." That's all I could think to say.
Brian asked, "Does Manna count you down during your breaks at
Burger-G?"
"Yes, every minute you get a reminder."
Even your breaks were supervised. I had never thought about it, but
all the breaks at Burger-G were staggered as well.
When Mom and I went to shop in Brian's store, you could feel the
difference that Manna made. Every two or three minutes an employee
would walk past you no matter where you were in the store. The
merchandise on the shelves was always neat, and everything was
stocked. The floors were spotless. Shopping carts never stacked up in
the parking lot. If you needed help, you knew that all you had to do
was stand there and an employee would walk by in a minute or so.
As the Manna software evolved, it gained more and more
responsibility. From the start Manna was able to schedule employee
hours. Manna printed a piece of paper for each employee to put on the
refrigerator--it told you your hours for the week. In version 2.0
they went further. They connected Manna to the telephone network and
the public email network. So Manna was able to begin calling and
emailing employees and reminding them to show up on time. If an
employee didn't show up, Manna could call in a replacement. If the
store became unexpectedly crowded, Manna could call in
reinforcements.
In version 3.0, the software gained the ability to fire employees as
well. I had a friend who got fired that way. He came into the store
late for his shift, and it was his third time being late. He punched
in and put on his headset. He walked over to the eye scan station to
log in. He said Manna sounded normal, and had him working normally
for about half an hour. Then Manna asked him to walk to Zone 7 at the
back of the store. A Burger-G security guy was standing there with
three sheets of paper. The security guy was wearing the solid black
security uniform, the opaque sunglasses and a headset integrated into
the helmet. He looked back and there was another security guy
standing near the door. Manna said to him, "Steven J. Canis, employee
number 4378561, your employment at Burger-G store number 152 is
hereby terminated in accordance with employee manual paragraph 12.1,
failure to appear at work on time." Manna read him the three pages of
termination information paragraph by paragraph and asked him to
confirm each paragraph. He could not return to that Burger-G store
for a year. He could not reapply to Burger-G for five years. Stuff
like that. Manna made him sign the papers and the security guys
escorted him out of the store to his car. The security guys never
said a word, but Manna was talking to him during the entire walk,
telling him to look down, to make no gestures, to speak to no one.
The last thing Manna said to him was, "Remove your headset and hand
it to the security officer on your left. Goodbye."
It didn't take long for word to get around. Pretty much, if you knew
you were going to be late and you had been late before, you called
Manna on your cell phone and quit. Manna emailed the forms to you,
had you phone in when you got them so it could read them to you, and
you signed them. It really cut down on people being late.
By version 4.0, Manna gained the ability to outsource. Let's say that
Manna decided it was time to repaint the lines in the parking lot.
Manna would make this decision using customer surveys and by
periodically asking employees questions about the parking lot, the
paint inside the store, the exterior of the store, the roof, etc. An
inspector from Burger-G corporate would also come once a month and
feed information about the store and grounds into the Manna system.
When Manna made the decision to repaint the stripes in the parking
lot, it would call several companies and get bids. Manna did not do
this on the phone, obviously. It did it electronically through the
Internet. By this time, most companies were hooked into the Manna
network, even if the company did not use Manna to manage employees.
The two pieces of software--the Manna software running the Burger-G
restaurant and the Manna software running the parking lot maintenance
company--would bid and negotiate through the Internet.
Because everything was done by machine, the restaurant's Manna system
could send out a request for bids to all the parking lot maintenance
companies in the area. Those companies would send bids back through
the network. The restaurant's Manna system would then connect with
hundreds of other Manna systems to check references and get feedback
on past experiences with each vendor. Based on the bid prices and the
feedback, Manna would select a vendor, negotiate terms, make a
deposit and schedule the repainting job. The entire process from
start to finish took less than 10 seconds.
As these communication networks between all the different Manna
systems built up, things started to get uncomfortable for every
worker. For example, the Manna software in each store knew about
employee performance in microscopic detail--how often the employee
was on time or early, how quickly the employee did tasks, how quickly
the employee answered the phone and responded to email, how the
customers rated the employee and so on. When an employee left a store
and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other Manna system
could request the employee's performance record. If an employee had
"issues"--late, slow, disorganized, unkempt--it became nearly
impossible for that employee to get another job. Nearly every company
with minimum wage employees used Manna software or something similar,
and performance records on employees were a major commodity freely
exchanged between corporations. A marginal employee got blacklisted
in the system very quickly.
That ability to blacklist employees is where things got ugly, because
it gave Manna far too much power. Manna was everywhere, and it was
managing about a half of the workers in the United States through
headsets, cell phones and email. Manna moved in and took over a big
chunk of the government as well. There came a point where tens of
millions of humans did nothing at work unless told to do so by a
Manna system.
You can imagine what would happen. Manna fires you because you don't
show up for work a couple times. Now you try to go get a job
somewhere else. No other Manna system is going to hire you. There had
always been an implicit threat in the American economy--"if you do
not have a job, you cannot make any money and you will therefore
become homeless." Manna simply took that threat and turned the
screws. If you did not do what Manna told you to, it would fire you.
Then you would not be able to get a job anywhere else. It gave Manna
huge leverage.
For example, Manna could call in reinforcements as it needed them.
You would get a call from Manna and it would say, "Your Burger-G
restaurant is experiencing unexpected customer volume. Can you help?"
The word "help" meant, "Can you be here in less than 10 minutes?" You
could say yes or no. The problem was that if you said "no" too many
times, you got fired. And when you got fired, it meant you were
blacklisted in the system.
Once you figured that out, you were pretty much forced to say "yes".
That meant that the printed schedules started to become pretty much
irrelevant. Manna would call you when it wanted to call you. Then it
started calling you to other restaurants. If things got slow in the
restaurant, Manna would send you home, then call you back in later if
things got busy again. You really could not say "no" very often,
meaning that Manna could interrupt your life at any time.
Version 4.0 of Manna was also the first version to enforce average
task times, and that was even worse. Manna would ask you to clean the
restrooms. But now Manna had industry-average times for restroom
cleaning stored in the software, as well as "target times". If it
took you too long to mop the floor or clean the sinks, Manna would
say to you, "lagging". When you said, "OK" to mark task completion
for Manna, Manna would say, "Your time was 4 minutes 10 seconds.
Industry average time is 3 minutes 30 seconds. Please focus on each
task." Anyone who lagged consistently was fired.
At the supercenter, Brian said that Manna was now tracking how fast
employees walked from point A to point B in the store, and if you did
not walk fast enough Manna would warn you about it. It was just like
working on an assembly line, where they could speed up the line to
make people work faster. But now the assembly line was everywhere,
and if you didn't keep up you knew that you would be blacklisted
nationwide.
The most surprising part of the Manna system, however, was the effect
it had on wages. As Manna spread to so many businesses, your choice
was to work for Manna or to be unemployed. When you started to work
for Manna, it paid you minimum wage. There was no reason for it to
pay you any more--your choice was minimum wage or zero. There was no
way to ask Manna for a raise. You could quit, but when you quit you
would be applying to another business that used Manna. It was going
to give you minimum wage too.
This was the societal power of Manna, and the basic equation was
pretty simple. You could take the job for minimum wage, or you could
be unemployed making zero. At any moment Manna could replace you with
another warm body, and that meant that you did what you were told for
minimum wage or you got fired. Manna, and the corporations that used
it, knew that that was the equation. There were plenty of unemployed
people who would take your spot as soon as you left.
The effect of Manna was to stratify out all the minimum wage workers
in America. At the bottom you had the people who were unemployable.
They had screwed up and been blacklisted by Manna. They were back
living with their parents or sleeping on the sofa with a friend. You
could get yourself un-blacklisted, but if you got blacklisted more
than a couple times, you were dead.
Then there were all the unemployed people. Between Manna improving
efficiency and forcing out the managers, plus overseas outsourcing
taking out white collar jobs, plus machines like the automated
checkout lines and burger flippers coming on line and so on, there
were plenty of people who were unemployed. Unemployed people went
around all day applying to jobs. But in a sense, that was pointless.
All of the interconnected Manna systems knew every single person in
the job pool. Manna also knew the performance of every single person
who had ever worked in the system. You were in an incredibly bad spot
if you were unemployed.
Then there were all the people being managed by Manna. They all made
minimum wage. If you were wearing a headset at work you were making
minimum wage and everyone knew it. And everyone knew that if you did
not do what Manna told you to do, as fast as Manna told you to do it,
you would be unemployed and making nothing.
And then there was everyone else--the doctors, lawyers, accountants,
office workers, executives, politicians. The executives and
politicians made a ton of money and they were never going to be
wearing headsets. Joe Garcia at Burger-G was making $100 million per
year and flaunting it like a rock star.
And Manna was starting to move in on some of the white collar work
force. The basic idea was to break every job down into a series of
steps that Manna could manage. No one had ever realized it before,
but just about every job had parts that could be subdivided out.
HMOs and hospitals, for example, were starting to put headsets on the
doctors and surgeons. It helped lower malpractice problems by making
sure that the surgeon followed every step in a surgical procedure.
The hospitals could also hyper-specialize the surgeons. For example,
one surgeon might do nothing but open the chest for heart surgery.
Another would do the arterial grafts. Another would come in to
inspect the work and close the patient back up. What this then meant,
over time, was that the HMO could train technicians to do the opening
and closing procedures at much lower cost. Eventually, every part of
the subdivided surgery could be performed by a super-specialized
technician. Manna kept every procedure on an exact track that
virtually eliminated errors. Manna would schedule 5 or 10 routine
surgeries at a time. Technicians would do everything, with one actual
surgeon overseeing things and handling any emergencies. They all wore
headsets, and Manna controlled every minute of their working lives.
That same hyper-specialization approach could apply to lots of white
collar jobs. Lawyers, for example. You could take any routine legal
problem and subdivide it--uncontested divorces, real estate
transactions, most standard contracts, and so on. It was surprising
where you started to see headsets popping up, and whenever you saw
them you knew that the people were locked in, that they were working
every minute of every day and that wages were falling.
A decade later I was getting out of school. I had a BA in education
and a master's degree in educational administration. My plan was to
teach in high school for two or three years so that I had experience
"in the trenches", and then move into an administrative or government
position. I was ready to start teaching and I was looking forward to
it. Education was one area that, so far, had been largely untouched
by Manna, so in that sense I was lucky. I was also lucky that there
were jobs available, and I did not have a lot of problems finding an
open position. That was a miracle.
My graduation year was an important year for me--I had been working
at Burger-G all through school to make spending money, and now I
would have my first real job free from Manna.
But it turned out to be a pivotal year for America as a whole. It was
a funny coincidence. My graduation year was the year that computer
vision came of age.
# Chapter 3
No one really thought of the Manna software as a robot at all. To
them, Manna was just a computer program running on a PC. When most
normal people thought about robots, they thought about independent,
autonomous, thinking robots like the ones they saw in science fiction
films. C-3PO and R2-D2 were powerful robotic images, and people would
not believe they were looking at a robot until robots looked like
C-3PO.
The mechanical chassis for a C-3PO type robot had been around since
the turn of the century. Honda did the trailblazing with its ASIMO
robot, and once Honda had proven the concept many other manufacturers
followed Honda's lead. ASIMO could walk up and down stairs, kick a
ball and so on, and it looked completely natural. The problem was
that ASIMO needed a human operator pushing a joystick to tell it what
to do.
The thing that held robots back was vision. Nearly everything a
person does is aided by vision--so much so that we take vision
completely for granted. But if you close your eyes and try to do
anything, you realize just how important vision is.
For example, when you enter a room where the light is dim, you think
in your head, "I need to turn on the lights." You use your eyes to
look on the wall for a light switch. When you find it you use your
eyes to guide your hand to the switch. You then use your eyes to
figure out what kind of switch it is. Is it a toggle switch? A
push-button switch? A dimmer switch with a knob? A dimmer switch with
a slider? None of the above? Once you figure it out, you use your
eyes to guide your fingers to manipulate the switch in the
appropriate way. Or maybe you look at the wall and there is no switch
to be found. Now you start looking for a lamp in the room. Is it a
touch lamp? Or is the switch on the base of the lamp? Maybe the
switch is near the bulb, and you have to push it or twist it or pull
a chain... Your vision guides you every step of the way. It is nearly
impossible to do anything in a complex environment without vision.
And turning on a lamp is a very simple thing. It gets a lot more
complicated when you are trying to run through a forest, ride your
bicycle down a busy a street or find your way to a particular address
in a large subdivision.
Without vision, robots could not move around or manipulate objects.
All of the other hardware was there. Legs and balance systems to
allow bipedal motion had been in place for decades. Robotic fingers
and hands with very fine motor control were easy to create. AI
software to set goals and make decisions was getting more powerful
every day. Everything was there but the vision system.
You could see that society was ready for the robots to arrive. The
first real robotic system installed in a human position of trust was
in the airline industry. The terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center in 2001 had been a wake-up call. Then there was a run of six
airline accidents, all attributed to pilot or ATC error, which made
everyone nervous. Then the unthinkable happened. Two airline pilots,
both sleeper agents for an Asian terrorist organization, flew their
planes into massive U.S. targets almost simultaneously and killed
nearly 50,000 people. One hit a basketball arena full of spectators,
and the other ripped through the Democratic national convention. That
was the end of human pilots in the cockpit.
As it turned out, the transition to robotic planes was remarkably
easy. Airplanes were already controlled by autopilots while enroute.
Radar systems on the ground and in the planes were already taking off
and landing the planes automatically. An airplane did not need a
vision system--its "vision" was radar, and radar had been around for
more than half a century. There was also a secondary backup system
that gave airplanes a form of consciousness. Airplanes could detect
their exact location using GPS systems. These GPS systems were
married to very detailed digital maps of the ground and the airspace
over the ground. The maps told the airplane where every single
building and structure was on the ground. So even if the autopilot
failed and told the plane to go somewhere unsafe, a "conscious" plane
would refuse to fly there. It was, quite literally, impossible for a
conscious plane to fly into a building--the plane "knew" that flying
into a building was "wrong." If the autopilot went insane, the
conscious plane shut it off and radioed for help. If all the engines
failed or fell off, the plane knew what was on the ground in the
vicinity and did its best to crash into an unpopulated area.
Soon there were no human airline pilots and no human air traffic
controllers in the system. Everything about flying through the air
was automated. The cockpit was stripped out of airplanes and the
space became a lounge or a seating area. With human beings out of the
loop, the safety record of the airline industry improved and people
came to trust the airlines again. No one cared at all that there was
no human pilot in the cockpit--people actually trusted machines more
than human beings.
The first breakthrough in true computer vision came from a
university. The newest video game consoles came out, and these
consoles had extremely powerful CPUs able to process 10 trillion
operations per second. By adding 100 gigabytes of RAM to the console
and then networking 1,000 of these video game consoles together, a
university research team created a machine able to process 10
quadrillion operations per second on 100 trillion bytes of RAM. They
had created a $500,000 machine with processing power approaching that
of a human brain. With that much processing power and memory on tap,
the researchers were finally able to start creating real vision
processing algorithms.
Within a year they had two demonstration projects that got a lot of
media attention. The first was an autonomous humanoid robot that,
given an apartment number, could walk through a city, find the
building, ride the elevator or walk up the steps and knock on that
apartment door. The second was a car that could drive itself
door-to-door in rush hour traffic without any human intervention. By
combining the walking robot and the self-driving car, the researchers
demonstrated a completely robotic delivery system for a pizza
restaurant. In a widely reported publicity stunt, the research team
ordered a pizza and had it delivered by robot to their lab 25 minutes
later.
A network of 1,000 video game consoles was not exactly portable, so
the demonstration robots that this research team created did not have
the brain onboard. The robots talked to the VBrain through wireless
connections. However, this research team had proven that machine
vision was possible and workable in some of the most complex and
real-world tasks imaginable.
The more significant breakthrough came a few years later. Researchers
at a chip company had followed the work of the vision team, and they
realized that the 64-bit floating point operations in the video game
console were not the optimal unit of calculation for a vision
processing machine. Instead, they created a new computer architecture
could handle the problem much more efficiently. This realization made
massively parallel chip designs for vision very easy to manufacture.
The chip company released its first vision processing module--a 10
petaop custom vision processor--shortly thereafter. The OEM price for
the module was $8,000.
That module opened the floodgates. Within a year, hundreds of
manufacturers were showing prototype robots. There were delivery
robots, cleaning robots, cooking robots, construction robots, baggage
handling robots, welding robots, landscaping robots, truck-driving
robots, retail robots, taxi robots, security robots, etc.
Take something as simple as painting a room. You could stick one of
the new painting robots in the room with 5 gallons of paint. Two
hours later the entire room was perfectly painted. You didn't have to
cover the furniture or even move the furniture. The robot did
everything, and the job was perfect. Not one drop of paint was
spilled, not one streak could be seen on the molding. Every line,
every corner, every painted surface was faultless. There were also
new robots to frame a house, side it, stack bricks and put on the
roof.
The automotive industry demonstrated cars with the vision and control
systems built right into the vehicle. The new robotic cars could
drive themselves door to door, drop off the passengers and then drive
down the block to park themselves. It meant you could read or watch
TV on your way to work, and the car did all the driving. There was no
reason to have a "driver's seat" and a steering wheel in these new
vehicles, so the interior of a car became much more functional--the
front seat could face the back of the car, and it could fold out into
a bed. The automated cars promised to reduce traffic congestion,
dramatically improve highway safety and make the drive to work much
more comfortable. There were also automated taxis and robotic trucks.
In the retail and fast food industries, the number of prototype
robots boggled the mind. Robots could empty a customer's cart, scan
the tags on the products and put them into bags. Robots could stock
items on the shelves. Robots could sweep the floors and clean the
restrooms. Within two years, Burger-G was demonstrating and debugging
a completely robotic Burger-G restaurant at the same location where
they had first deployed Manna. Instead of telling human employees
what to do, Manna told the robots what to do.
All of the hardware and general intelligence for these robots had
been in place for a decade. What was missing was vision. As soon as
the inexpensive vision module became available, the number of robots
in the marketplace exploded.
The effect that the robotic explosion had on the employment landscape
was startling. Most large retailers began replacing human employees
with robots as fast as they could. The robots stocked the shelves,
swept the floors, helped customers with questions and carried the
customers' purchases out to their cars. Every fast food restaurant
was doing the same thing. Construction sites started to switch to
robots for every repetitive task: framing, siding, roofing, painting,
etc. Robotic cars and trucks took to the highways and accident rates
started to decline. It was easy to see that the completely robotic
airport, amusement park, grocery store and factory were on the way.
The switchover to robots was proceeding with remarkable speed, and
for some reason it seemed like no one had really thought about the
effects of the transition. All of these people being replaced by the
robots needed some form of income to survive, but the job pool was
shrinking. The American "service economy" was what replaced the
"factory economy", and America now had about half of its workers
wrapped up in low-paying service sector jobs. These were the jobs
perfectly suited for the new robots. The question was, what would
happen to the half of the population being displaced from their
service sector jobs?
# Chapter 4
Burt wanted to go outside and take a walk. Weather permitting, we
tried to walk every evening. We left the cafeteria and departed
through the main door along with a stream of other people.
The building we exited was another one of the terrafoam projects.
Terrafoam was a super-low-cost building material, and all of the
welfare dorms were made out of it. They took a clay-like mud, aerated
it into a thick foam, formed it into large panels and fired it like a
brick with a mobile furnace. It was cheap and it allowed them to
erect large buildings quickly. The robots had put up the building
next to ours in a week.
The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people
on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive.
Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting
welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them
meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that
housing and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to
spend per welfare recipient.
As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare
recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum
wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse
of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they
were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum
occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from
urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an
old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with
a bed and a TV--the world's best pacifier. During the day the bed was
a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet
and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had
just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in
each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived--he had
had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that.
At least he was polite about it.
At the end of the very long hallway of rooms there was the communal
bathroom. This was my least favorite part of the terrafoam
experience. The bathroom consisted of a bunch of sinks, a bunch of
shower stalls, a bunch of toilets. Given the location of our room, it
was about a 200 foot walk down to the bathroom. When you had to go at
night, it almost seemed easier to wet the bed and let the robots deal
with it in the morning. By the time you walked all the way down and
back, you were completely awake.
There were no windows anywhere in the building. It was a cost-cutting
measure, but it also helped to make every room identical. The ceiling
height was 7 feet throughout, so it felt very small all the time. LED
lights everywhere--our room was absolutely identical to every other
room in the building and had a single, bare two-foot LED panel bolted
to the ceiling. There was the same panel every ten feet in the
hallways. Absolutely everything in the entire building was brown.
Brown walls, brown bedspreads, brown ceilings, brown floors. Even the
bathroom and every fixture in it was completely brown.
Downstairs there was the cafeteria staffed by robots. The robots were
not bad--the food was acceptable. They also kept the bathrooms,
hallways and rooms spotless. Every day at 7AM, 12 PM and 6 PM the
breakfast, lunch and dinner meal shifts began. There were six
15-minute shifts per meal to save on cafeteria space. Burt and I had
the third shift. You sat down, food was served, you ate, you talked
for 5 minutes while you drank your "coffee" and you left so the next
shift could come in. With 24,000 people coming in per shift, there
was no time for standing in a cafeteria-style line. Everyone had an
assigned seat, and an army of robots served you right at your table.
Because no one had a window, they could really pack people into these
buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print.
It was a perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube.
Each cube originally held exactly 76,800 people. Doubling this to
153,600 people in each building was unthinkable, but they were doing
it anyway. On the other hand, you had to marvel at the efficiency. At
that density, they could house every welfare recipient in the entire
country in less than 1,500 of these buildings. By spacing the
buildings 100 feet apart, they could house 200,000,000 people in a
space of less than 20 square miles if they had wanted to. At that
density, they could put everyone in the country without a job into a
space less than five miles square in size, put a fence around it and
forget about us. If they accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb or two
on us, we would all be gone and they wouldn't have to worry about us
anymore.
America was no different from a third world nation. With the arrival
of robots, tens of millions of people lost their minimum wage jobs
and the wealth concentrated so quickly. The rich controlled America's
bureaucracy, military, businesses and natural resources, and the
unemployed masses lived in terrafoam, cut off from any opportunity to
change their situation. There was the facade of "free elections," but
only candidates supported by the rich could ever get on the ballot.
The government was completely controlled by the rich, as were the
robotic security forces, the military and the intelligence
organizations. American democracy had morphed into a third world
dictatorship ruled by the wealthy elite.
Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across
America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the
beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes.
Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones
covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in
America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet
messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about
starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil
disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and
preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces,
and riots are impossible.
The only solution for most people, as they became unemployed, was
government handouts. Terrafoam housing was what the government handed
out.
My situation was atypical really, because I was able to stay out of
Terrafoam much longer than most people. I had been lucky enough to be
a teacher, and I made the transition to administrator. That allowed
me to hang on a good long time. But as the department of education
became more and more robotic, I was squeezed out.
It was a funny experience. Manna informed me on Friday afternoon that
I was to be fired. But the Manna network also knew that my bank
account was close to zero and there was no way I would be able to
make the next rent payment. The Manna network also knew that there
were no job prospects for me, since it knew the employment status of
everyone. Like most people, nearly everything I owned was leased. I
wouldn't be able to make the payments on any of that either. I was
unmarried and all of my relatives were in Terrafoam already. Manna
knew that. No one I knew in the city had offered to take me on as a
guest, so that was out and Manna knew it.
So Manna put it all together and took the liberty to unplug me. As I
finished the dismissal interview and left the building, I had two
robotic escorts. The robot on my right addressed me as a robotic bus
pulled up. The bus looked to be about half full.
"Jacob Lewis105, you are now unemployed. Do you have other means of
employment?"
Of course it knew the answer, but this formality could not be
avoided. "No."
"Do you have guest status with any resident?" The robot asked.
"No."
"Do you have means of support unknown to me?"
I suppose I could have stashed a cache of gold under my mattress, and
this question allowed me to declare it. Such a cache would, of
course, be grounds for arrest, so I was screwed either way. "No." I
was without any means of support.
"In accordance with ordinance 605.12b, you have been assigned room
140352 in building 16, resident quant C. This assignment provides you
with suitable housing and nourishment to sustain your life. Please
board the bus."
That was how you ended up in Terrafoam. The system knew you had no
means of support, so it "gave" you one. You could leave terrafoam
once you regained a means of support, but there really was no way to
do that unless Manna gave it to you.
Was it prison? Yes. But there were no walls. The food was good. The
robots were as nice and respectful as they could be. You could walk
outside wherever and whenever you wanted to. But there was an
invisible edge. When you walked too far away from your building and
approached that edge, two robots would approach you. I had tried it
many times.
"Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the
next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed."
There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn
around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train
derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on.
They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of
their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any
move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were
immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried
it twice.
It was a nice day. The sun was shining and the temperature was mild,
so a lot of people were out milling around. Burt and I had decided to
walk down along the river as far as the robots would let us. I was
wearing the same coverall everyone else was, and I unbuttoned the top
two buttons because the sun made it warm.
"Today's your one year anniversary in terrafoam. How's it feel?" Burt
asked.
"I'm thinking that there has to be a way out of here." I said.
"I know what you are saying. I try not to think about it. But it's
not that unusual. Over the course of history, billions of people have
lived this way. Think back to when you were living in suburbia. Your
parents had a 3,000 square foot house and the pool at the turn of the
century. You were living it up. Unfortunately, at that moment in
history, there were billions of people around the world living in
poverty--they were living off a dollar or two per day. Meanwhile,
your family had 300 dollars a day. Did you do anything about it?
Billions and Billions of people living in third-world countries,
squatting together in the dirt, crapping in ditches. They would walk
down by the river just like we are doing right now and say to each
other, 'There must be a way out.' They could see that they were
lost--totally wasted human potential trapped in a terrible situation.
Their kids and their kids' kids forever would live like this because
there was absolutely no way out. Did anyone stop to help them? Did
you stop to help them? No. You were too busy splashing in the pool.
Those billions of people lived and died in incredible poverty and no
one cared."
Burt could really get on your nerves like that. This was not the
first time I had heard this soliloquy. It was depressing, and true,
but after the third or fourth time it got old. Of course, he had been
in terrafoam for just over 10 years. I guess he'd had a lot more time
to stew about it.
And he was right. No one helped the billions of people living in
poverty at the turn of the century. And no one would help us now. The
world simply did not work that way. If you are living a comfortable
life in a comfortable neighborhood with a swimming pool in the
backyard, what do you care about anyone else? You are immune to their
problems, so you keep on splashing and swimming. It never occurs to
you to help them, because it is so abstract.
"There has to be a way out of here," I repeated.
"Are you insane? You can't redesign society. No one can." Burt
laughed out loud as he said it. "Let's see, if I'm a rich person
living in a gorgeous, walled city in incredible luxury, let's see,
would I want to change things???? Hmmm. Hmmmm. This is a tough
question. That's why you are insane. You are never going to change
anything. We will live and die here. The rich have no need for us
anymore, and they certainly are not going to spread their wealth
around to us. Hell, why didn't you give your swimming pool up at the
turn of the century to help the people starving and dying in Africa?
Or even other Americans living in poverty?" Burt was enjoying his
cynicism.
"It wouldn't have helped anything. One swimming pool would not have
helped anyone in Africa. That was the problem--even if you, as a
person, wanted to help, there was no way to help. That's why we need
to redesign society. Society should not allow one little group of
people to live like royalty while 80% of the people on the planet are
starving to death or living on welfare. Why would we create a society
like that? What good is it to have people with billions of dollars,
while the majority of people starve?" I asked.
"Society has always been like that. You lived like that 50 years ago.
Did you care?" Burt asked back.
"No, I didn't. But I should have. We shouldn't design a society like
that--it's like the Nazi's designing the death camps." I said.
Burt replied quickly, "Tell that to the Nazis. Tell that to the
people living like royalty today. They would give you a thousand
reasons why they deserve what they've got. They worked hard. Blah
blah blah. They would also gladly tell us why we, and all the other
poor people and welfare recipients, don't deserve anything. It's
exactly the same logic that allowed you to have a swimming pool while
half the world starved to death. It makes no sense, unless you are
the one with the swimming pool. Then it makes great sense to you. And
the people with the swimming pools have the power to enforce it, so
that's how it is."
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there
for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or to be
living in dirt shacks and starving?"
"Did you think about that when you were swimming? Of course not. That
is not human nature. Out of sight, out of mind. You could not see the
people starving, so you did not think about them. You didn't care in
the least." Burt said.
I replied, "We could change it now. Robots are doing all the work.
Human beings--all human beings--could now be on perpetual vacation.
That's what bugs me. If society had been designed for it somehow, we
could all be on vacation instead of on welfare. Everyone on the
planet could be living in luxury. Instead, they are planning to kill
us off. Did you hear that women were trying to drink the water out of
the river? Some people think they're putting contraceptives in the
water."
"Yes. I also heard that the river water makes you incredibly sick.
The robots don't even try to stop them." Burt said.
"They need to boil the water."
"In what???" Burt looked over at me. Then he looked ahead at the
river. Then he looked at me again. "OK, OK. So what would be better?
How would you create a different society, rather than living like
this?"
"I have no idea. And even if I did, it wouldn't change anything."
We walked on in silence for about half a mile. Three robots
approached us. One of them said, "Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105
and Burton Forrester416. There is a rabid dog in the next zone and,
for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed."
"Thank you," I said, and we turned around. The robots followed at a
respectful distance for 50 paces and then dispersed.
"A rabid dog? I've never heard that one." Burt said. We walked all
the way back to the building in silence. We took the elevator up to
the 14th floor, walked down the main corridor, then down our corridor
to our room.
I walked in thinking my own thoughts, and then jumped back three feet
when I noticed them. I nearly knocked Burt over, except that he was
as surprised as I was at the sight of the two women sitting on his
bunk. They were watching the television and turned to us as we
entered with smiles on their faces.
"Who are you?" I asked, stating the obvious question. The two women
stood. They were dressed casually but in very nice clothing. They
both wore jewelry--something I had not seen for a year. Burt and I
were the same age, and these women appeared younger, although it is
so hard to tell these days. They certainly were not terrafoam
residents. And both were carrying thick books. They appeared to be
either phone books from a bygone era, or large catalogs like Sears
used to have long ago. I had not seen a book like that for 20 years
at least.
"I'll second that, " was Burt's reaction.
"We are so sorry to startle you," said the woman on the left. "We
know this is unexpected, but we are here to talk to Jacob Lewis105.
Are either of you him?"
"I am Jacob Lewis105," I said. "How did you get in here? I am amazed
that the robots allowed it."
"That will become clear within the next hour. Would it be possible
for us to speak to you alone, Mr. Lewis105?"
"I guess. Burt, can I have the room for a little bit?"
Burt said, "I'll go down and talk to Mike. Come get me if you need
me."
They sat back down on the bunk, which really was no easy task given
the space available. They looked so tremendously out of place in the
room to begin with. They offered me a seat as well.
"Jacob Lewis105, what we are going to tell you today may be quite
surprising to you, but it is all true. It will take approximately 30
minutes and then, with your permission, you will be able to exit the
terrafoam system today. May we begin?"
# Chapter 5
I reached out to shake hands with the woman on my left. "Call me
Jake," I said.
She took my hand and said, "I am Linda." I turned to greet the woman
on my right and she said, "And I am Cynthia."
Linda started right in, "Cynthia and I are here to talk to you about
the Australia Project. This is for you." She handed me the thick book
she had been holding. On the cover it said, "Australia Project
Catalog", with a picture of a happy group of people on the beach, and
along the right hand side there was a row of pictures showing a
house, a shirt, a meal on a table and several electronic products. I
started to flip through the catalog.
"Have you ever heard of the Australia Project?" Cynthia asked.
But I was still looking at the catalog. It was a giant paper catalog,
printed in full color. The paper was thin, and the book had to have
over 3,000 pages in it. It was a lot like an old-fashioned Sears
catalog--pages and pages of products. As I flipped through it, there
were hundreds of pages showing different styles of clothing. Hundreds
of pages showing different meals. Hundreds of pages showing all
different kinds of vacation resorts. Thousands of pages of "consumer
products", for lack of a better word: Electronics, appliances,
furniture, tools, you name it.
"Is this paper?" I asked. A catalog like this containing this much
paper was obscene. It was amazing to me that anyone still printed
paper catalogs.
Linda said, "It's like paper. We call it LC, or laminar carbohydrate.
The terrafoam robots won't let us bring anything metal or electronic
into the terrafoam system, so this is the best thing we have to show
you what the Australia Project is about."
"Have you ever heard of the Australia Project?" Cynthia repeated.
"No, I haven't," I said as I continued to flip.
"A number of years ago, your father purchased two shares of 4GC, Inc.
in your name. These shares entitle you and one other person to come
live as citizens of the Australia Project. You may leave the
terrafoam system with us today if you choose to." Linda said.
I stopped flipping and looked at her. "I can leave the terrafoam
system today? What does that mean?" I asked. She had my undivided
attention.
"It means that you can walk out of this building with us today, fly
to Australia and begin a new life as a citizen of the Australia
Project." Linda said.
"How is that possible? Why would the robots allow it? Are you telling
me the robots will just let me hop on a bus and drive away?" I asked.
"More or less. You do have to sign out of the system." Linda said.
"Excuse me if I laugh out loud. And I don't mean to be rude. But if
that's the case, then why haven't I been able to simply walk away?
I've been trying to find a way out of here for a year." I pointed
out.
"The robots won't let you walk away because, if they did, you would
end up as a homeless person on some city street. Without a job, you
are by default homeless in the American economy. None of the wealthy
people want to look at homeless people, so you are warehoused here
and forced to stay here." Linda said.
"In terrafoam, you are out of sight and out of mind, as they say,"
Cynthia added. "Since we are providing the transportation, and we are
taking you to another country, the robots are happy to see you go. It
means one less mouth for them to feed."
Linda said. "If you would allow us, we would like to spend ten
minutes telling you about the Australia Project. What we are talking
about will make much more sense to you at that point, and it will be
much easier for you to make the decision."
"The decision?" I asked.
"The decision whether you want to leave with us or not." Linda said.
"I'm all ears." I replied.
Linda began describing.
"The Australia Project is what we call a fourth generation
civilization. Prior to the Australia Project, civilization has been
through three phases. There was the hunt/gather phase, the agrarian
phase, and then the industrial phase. What you are experiencing here
in the terrafoam system is the ultimate destination for many of the
industrialized nations of the world. In your case, in America, robots
created a massive concentration of wealth that, eventually,
imprisoned millions of people."
Cynthia added, "What you are experiencing in America is the worst
that the robots have to offer. Robots control the humans, rather than
vice versa."
Linda continued, "The Australia Project was born specifically to
solve these problems and create a new form of human civilization. It
is a fourth generation civilization conceived of by Eric Renson. Eric
was an American who was heavily involved in what was then called the
open software movement. As an American, he had seen Manna in its
earliest phases. He could envision what Manna, combined with the
coming robots, would mean to America and Western civilization as a
whole."
"He at first tried to fight it, but realized that was impossible.
Instead, he eventually came up with a completely new way to think
about human societies. In the Australia Project, humans get the best
that the robots have to offer, rather than the worst. He took the
open source model of free software, added the robots and brought the
model to the material world. The revolutionary idea in open source
software is the fact that no one owns the code. Because there is no
owner, the code is free to everyone."
Cynthia picked up the thread. "Eric's key concept was extremely
simple. What he realized is that, in a robotic civilization,
everything can be free."
"How is that possible?" I asked.
"It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land.
Say something the size of your state of California. This land
contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from
which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and
aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into
any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is
carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If
you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That
is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and
they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the
robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free.
Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture
things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create
free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and
make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding,
nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar
carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy
and free resources, everything is free."
Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea--everything can be free
in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that
everything should be free. Furthermore, he believed that every human
being should get an equal share of all of these free products that
the robots are producing. He took the American phrase 'all men are
created equal' quite literally."
I said, "That sounds great. In fact, that sounds perfect. But Eric
does not own California. Rich people own all of the land and all of
the resources in the United States, and they are going to give none
of it to anyone. They expect to be paid for what is 'theirs'."
"Yes, that is true. That ownership model is, ultimately, why you are
here in the terrafoam system. If a small group of people own all of
the resources and have complete control of them, then everyone else
is at their mercy." Linda said. "The key to Eric's brilliance is the
fact that he found a way around this problem."
"Eric realized that ownership, in the Western sense, is the problem.
His solution was to turn ownership upside down. Eric used the
corporate ownership model to create a civilization that accomplishes
his goals."
"Eric formed a corporation called 4GC, Inc. He sold shares in this
corporation for $1,000 each to one billion people. You will learn
about all of this during your orientation. He put lots of rules
around the shares to avoid abuse--for example, one person can access
only one share of stock. The upshot is that, by selling one billion
shares of stock in 4GC, Inc., Eric accumulated one trillion dollars
in the corporation."
"With that money, he started to build his new civilization. The first
thing he needed was land--resources. He approached several
governments, and eventually formed a partnership with the government
of Australia. He was able to buy 1.5 million square miles of the
Australian outback for $250 billion. Eric then began buying other
resources he needed--factories, mines, companies around the world. He
also began building new factories in Australia, all of them
completely automated, to build robots. With his $1 trillion, he
needed to buy all of the resources necessary for one billion people
to be completely self-sufficient. He was able to accomplish that goal
in Australia for about $600 billion."
"The amazing part," Cynthia pointed out, "is that, once he had done
all that and started the major work in Australia, the citizens of
Australia decided to merge with the project. The entire continent of
Australia--all 2 billion or so acres of it--became the Australia
Project."
Linda continued, "Eric also started with several core principles that
govern life for people living in the Australia Project. One of those
principles, as I mentioned, is that everyone is equal. Each person
gets an equal share of the resources that the corporation owns.
Another is complete recyclability. The resources owned by the project
are finite, and by making everything completely recyclable, they are
reused over and over and never diminish. The LC for this catalog, for
example, is manufactured entirely from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in
the air. If you burn it, it returns to the air. The same thing
happens if you drop it on the ground and it decomposes. Every object,
every product that the robots make for us is completely recyclable in
the same way. Whether the object is made from carbohydrates, carbon
polymers, aluminum, glass... it is all completely reusable. All that
you need is energy and robots to break any object back down to its
core elements and then form it into something new."
"Another one of Eric's core principles is that no one owns anything.
It is quite likely that, when you lived in America, you leased
everything. You never owned anything, but someone else did and you
had to pay for every single thing you used. That's another form of
resource ownership that concentrates wealth. In Australia, you own
nothing, but neither does anyone else. Whatever you have is yours
until you die, and then it gets recycled. Or you can give it back to
be recycled whenever you want. There are lots of people who do that
constantly with clothes. They wear something new every single day,
and the old clothes are recycled."
"That's what I do. I like to be up-to-the-minute on fashions," said
Cynthia.
"Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up
during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism,
and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse.
It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails
that destroy someone's career, or if you are anonymously releasing
computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings.
Anonymity breeds abuse. In Australia, if you walk from your home to a
park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone
else's home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked
by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so
on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit
an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who
commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined."
"There has not been a murder in years. It is impossible to do it
anonymously, and everyone knows what happens when you murder someone
else. People do commit crimes occasionally. Mostly it is kids who
have not completed their education." Cynthia said. "They are
disciplined and the problem goes away. You'll learn all about this in
the orientation."
"Can I ask you something?" I asked.
"Absolutely. That's why we are here." Linda said.
"You are telling me that you live in a society where everything is
free. And everyone is equal. Everything is completely recycled, so I
take it there is no pollution..." I said.
"True," Linda said. "Zero pollution, because of total reuse. To have
pollution, it would mean that you are spewing something into the
environment rather than reusing it. There can be no pollution in our
society because of Eric's core principle on reuse."
"And there is no crime?" I said.
"There is minimal crime," Linda corrected me. "People will make
mistakes, even in a perfect world, especially while they are
learning. Mistakes are a part of learning, and everyone accepts that.
But as soon as the mistake is committed, that person is detained and
retrained. The core principal is 'do no harm.' The legal system is
set up to detect and correct harm automatically. Re-education is
usually all the discipline needed, because at the root most crime is
a misunderstanding of the rules of society."
"And everything is not free in the way you are probably thinking."
Cynthia said.
"That's what I wanted to ask about. If everything is free, then
what's to stop me from demanding a 100,000 foot house on a thousand
acres of land and a driveway paved in gold bricks? It makes no sense,
because obviously everyone cannot demand that. And how can anything
be free? That is hard to believe in the first place." I said.
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's
exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal
access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done
through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week
and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else.
This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with
your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use
once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it,
and your account gets debited."
"Let me show you." said Cynthia. She opened her catalog to a page,
and pointed to one of the pictures. It was clothing. "This is what I
am wearing." she said. "See--it is 6 credits. In a typical week I
only spend about 70 or so credits on clothes. That's why I like to
wear something new every day."
"The robots did manufacture Cynthia's outfit for free. They took
recycled resources, added energy and robotic labor and created what
she is wearing. It cost nothing to make it. She paid credits simply
to keep track of how many resources she is using."
"Where did the energy come from?" I asked.
"The sun. The Australia Project is powered mostly by the sun and the
wind, and the wind comes from the sun if you think about it."
"Where did the robots come from?"
"The same place Cynthia's outfit came from. It's the same thing.
Robots take recycled resources, add energy and robotic labor and make
new robots. The robots are free, the energy is free, the resources
are all completely recycled and we own them, so they are free.
Everything is free."
"The credits simply make sure that everyone gets equal access to the
resources. There is a finite amount of power that can be generated on
any given day, for example. Things like that. The credits make sure
everyone gets an equal share of the total pool of resources."
"Holy shit." I said. I was looking through the catalog again. Page
after page after page of products. There were thousands of different
types of housing, for example. And they all seemed to fall in the
range of 100 to 500 credits per week. Clothing cost nothing. Food
cost nothing.
"I'm not getting this." I said. "I'm not sure I could spend a
thousand credits if this catalog is right."
"Many people don't spend a thousand credits." she said. "If you are
working on a project you might, but that's about it."
"So how do I earn the credits?" I asked.
"Earn?" Linda asked back.
"No no no..." said Cynthia.
"Do you give me a job? The reason I am here is because I have no
job," I said.
"No. You see, it's all free. By being a shareholder, you already own
your share of the resources. The robots make products from the free
resources you and everyone else already owns. There is no forced
labor like there is in America. You do what you want, and you get
1,000 credits per week. We are all on an endless vacation."
"So why are you here?"
"What do you mean?"
"How did the robots get you to come here to talk to me?"
"We choose to do this. This is what we want to do. Just seeing the
look on your face now, and seeing all the looks you'll have as you go
through orientation, makes this an incredibly fun thing to do. I
mean, we remember exactly what it was like sitting where you are
sitting right now. It's a joyous experience to introduce people to
the Australia Project. Cynthia and I have done this once a year for
four years now. It's a different kind of vacation for us." Linda
said.
"This sounds totally unbelievable. But you said at the beginning that
this is all true." I said.
"It is all true." Linda said. "I didn't completely believe it either.
But it is all true. And it gets better every day."
"You said that I could leave the terrafoam system today. Did you mean
that? Can we leave now?" I asked.
"There are two minor things we have to cover first."
"There's always a catch." I said. I had a sinking feeling.
"No. It is not a catch. The first thing is that you have two shares
in 4GC, Inc. Your father probably purchased one for you and one for
your wife. You can use only one of these shares. Is there someone
else you would like to bring with you? Obviously you are not married.
But is there a friend or a relative you would like to give your other
share to?"
"Can I bring Burt?"
"Who is he?"
"My roommate. The guy I came in with?"
"Certainly. You can bring Burt. Can you find him now?"
"That's easy. He is two doors down. What's the other catch?"
"You have to agree to the core principles." Linda said.
She pulled a sheet out of my catalog and handed it to me. It only had
about 50 words on it. The title was, "The nine core Principles of 4GC."
"By signing this sheet of LC," Linda said, "You agree to abide by
Eric's core principles for 4GC. The only way for the Australia
Project to work is for everyone to abide by the core principles. They
will go over these principles in detail in the orientation, but this
is the high level. Within a week you will be able to recite these
from memory. Do you agree with these principles?"
I read down through the principles. Each one was very short:
* Everyone is equal
* Everything is reused
* Nothing is anonymous
* Nothing is owned
* Tell the truth
* Do no harm
* Obey the rules
* Live your life
* Better and better
"That's it?" I asked. "You must be kidding."
"That's it. You will be surprised how all-encompassing those 27 words
can be." Linda said. "That's what the orientation will help you with."
"Can I ask two questions?" I asked.
"Surely."
"How can I do anything besides living my life?"
"Well, you are living your life now..." Linda said, "and personally I
have to tell you that it leaves a lot to be desired! Those three
words are very important. Live Your Life means that you are able get
the most out of your life, as opposed to the least. Instead of dying
in Terrafoam, or dying in some job that you hate, you live your life
in the Australia Project in freedom and prosperity. Live Your Life
means that you are in control--again, the emphasis on freedom of
choice. You decide what you want to do, and then you are able to do
it. You reach your full potential. Live Your Life is the idea of
thinking about your life as a whole, as something that you get to
design and control. Does that make sense?"
"More sense than you can imagine."
"What is your other question?" she asked.
"Better and better?"
Linda replied, "That is a declaration of innovation. The goal is to
make things continuously better and better for everyone in the
Australia Project through constant innovation. We are constantly
looking for problems, identifying them and solving them. We are
constantly looking for and implementing new ideas. Things get better
and better every day. Terrafoam is, by contrast, 'Worse and worse.'"
"Sign me up!" I said.
She handed me a marker from her pocket and I signed the LC. "Now
press your thumb on the square to authenticate it," She said. A black
thumbprint appeared in the box when I lifted my finger.
"Congratulations!" They both said in unison.
"Can I go get Burt?"
"Yes. If you don't mind, you can sit with us as we explain 4GC to
him, and then we will leave."
I found Burt in Mike's room, brought him down, and in 20 minutes he
had signed on as well. He was as incredulous as I was. We went down
the elevator and as we walked through the first floor of the
building, Linda spoke to the robot that approached her. Burt and I
put on headsets and signed out of the Terrafoam system with her. We
walked about a quarter mile to a waiting bus.
When we got on, the bus was nearly full. It was easy to tell who was
who. Every terrafoam resident was wearing a brown coverall like me,
while all the escorts were dressed like rainbows. Everyone was
looking through the catalogs and talking.
Linda and I sat down on one side. Burt and Cynthia sat down on the
other, and the bus pulled away. Like everyone else I was looking
through the catalog, reading and asking Linda questions during the
whole drive. We were on the bus for about three hours, but it seemed
to go by in 10 minutes.
This had all seemed something like a dream, but it started to become
very real when we arrived at our destination. It was an immense
airport, with dozens of jets waiting at the gates. There were dozens
of buses dropping off passengers, and hundreds of people moving
through the facility. Every jet was painted bright green and marked
with a blue 4GC logo on the tail, and all of the buildings were
painted the same way.
We got off the bus and it really hit me as we walked into the first
part of the building. "This is our first stop," said Linda. "We've
got to get you out of those dreadful coveralls." She and Cynthia
guided Burt and me into a room on our right, which opened up into an
immense store. It was filled with racks and racks of every
conceivable kind of clothing."
"Once you get to Australia, the way you order clothing will be
nothing like this. But this is what you are used to right now, so it
is easier. Let's pick you out some decent clothes."
Linda and Cynthia picked out clothes for Burt and me. The robot sized
us, and we went to the dressing room and changed. Just that one
thing--putting on real clothing for the first time in a year--made
such an impact on me.
It was when we walked out of the store and got on the plane, however,
that I knew for sure we were not in Kansas any more...
# Chapter 6
Linda and Cynthia seemed to know exactly where we were going. We
simply walked through the airport, then through a wide door with a
large group of other people. It was as though we were heading into an
auditorium, but instead we were on the plane.
This airplane was immense. It had to be able to hold a thousand
people at least, and the entire cabin was appointed with the most
opulent first class features I had ever encountered. Every seat was a
recliner that was also able to fold out into a bed. They were
arranged in pairs, 14 across at the point where we entered, and there
were at least 5 other doors that I could see with people streaming
in. Linda took us to a pair of seats and said, "This pair is for us.
You take the far seat." Cynthia and Burt sat in the next pair over.
There was something odd going on, so I asked Linda, "How did we get
here?" Thinking back, I had realized something. There was not a
single sign anywhere in the building. There were no announcements
over any sort of PA system. Linda had never talked to anyone besides
Cynthia, Burt and me. The seats did not even have numbers on them.
Yet she had walked straight through the building, onto the plane,
straight to our seats and we sat down. So did everyone else.
"That is one of the many things that you will learn during the
orientation." She said. "Now make yourself comfortable. It's a bit of
a flight."
"Can I put my seat back?" I asked. I had seen that several other
people had already turned their seats into beds.
"Sure." She said. She did not touch anything, but the seat unfolded
automatically and I had myself a very comfortable single-size bed.
She opened a drawer and handed me a blanket.
I lay down, and I fell asleep immediately. It had been an incredibly
long day...
* * *
I felt someone squeezing my hand as I came back to consciousness. I
opened my mind, and then my eyes, and it took several seconds for
things in my head to snap back into place so that I could realize
what was going on.
We were still on the plane. Linda was still beside me, and she was
the one squeezing my hand. I looked at her and she looked at me. My
seat was raising itself slowly. All of that was normal. What was
abnormal was the walls of the plane.
I had not really paid attention to it before, but this plane had no
windows. Instead, the walls, ceiling and floor had turned completely
transparent. Or so it seemed. I reached down and touched the floor
and apparently it was some kind of screen. The entire interior of the
plane was covered with this screen material, and it was displaying a
view that made the plane appear transparent. Overhead there was a
brilliant blue sky with a few puffy clouds. Beside us in the distance
were other planes. Below was a remarkable city and we were flying
right over it.
The scene was absolutely amazing. An entire section of the landscape
was covered with the structure of the city, but it was entirely
different from a U.S. city. In the U.S. there would be rows of
buildings intersected by a grid of roads jammed with cars. Here the
structure was designed with an entirely different intention. The
amount of glass was the most impressive part. You could see huge
glass bubbles with lakes and parks inside of them. Tall buildings
that looked like apartment towers with an amazing variety of shapes
sprouted everywhere through the glass.
Up ahead I could see the airport. It was immense, with dozens of
planes parked next to terminal buildings. To the far right of it were
several immensely tall black structures. With the plane transparent
like it was, I could see how tall they were, and apparently they did
not have tops. I asked Linda, and I was not the only one pointing to
them.
"Those are the space elevators," she said, "You can ride them if you
want. They are just starting to be fully operational. There's even an
orbiting hotel and you can stay there for several days if you like.
It's a very popular spot for couples, but lots of people go simply
for the novelty of it."
"How can you have space elevators built and operational already? Last
I heard they were still 50 years off in the U.S." I asked.
"Things have slowed down a good bit in the U.S. I'm afraid." She
replied. "The economy retracted quite a bit when so many people ended
up in Terrafoam. Then you have the combined problems of egos,
politics and lawyers in the U.S. There are immensely rich people in
the U.S., but they all seem to have large egos. They would rather
compete and bash each other than cooperate. They are constantly suing
one another. And none of them wants to have anything to do with
taxes. With all that happening, it is very hard to get people
together to work on big projects. It makes it much harder to innovate
in the U.S. You will find that things are streamlined here, and we
are innovating at an incredible pace. It's all part of getting better
and better."
As if to illustrate her point, the plane was now landing vertically.
There was no runway, nor any need for one. We settled next to the
terminal building and the walls became opaque and normal once again.
I suppose the walls could display anything, but they had become
beige. The floor looked like polished marble once again.
We stepped out of the plane through the wide doors into the concourse
with about a thousand other people from the flight, and walked a
short distance. Here we stood in one of about 100 short lines. 100
"cars" would pull up, their overhead doors would flip open
automatically, two or four people would get in, the doors would all
close automatically, and those 100 cars would depart. A new set of
100 cars would arrive and the cycle would repeat. We stood in line
for less than two minutes and we were on our way. Inside the car,
Linda and I faced Burt and Cynthia sitting across from each other in
very nice reclining seats not unlike those on the plane. The interior
was roomy and well-lit, but there were no windows.
"We are only going 24.3 miles," Linda said, "So this will only take
4.25 minutes."
Since the car had no windows, it was impossible to tell what was
happening. But I could feel the car accelerate briskly. Three or four
minutes later I could feel it decelerate. The door popped open and we
stepped out, through an archway and into the lobby of an enormous
building.
From the lobby to the roof there was an open atrium at least 70
stories tall. The roof overhead was glass. Around the sides of the
atrium were balconies with plants streaming down, and then off the
balconies were thousands of rooms. It gave you an incredible feeling
of light and volume, and with the plants it was beautiful.
"This is where you'll both be staying during the orientation," Linda
said to Burt and me. We walked a short distance and stepped into one
of the glass elevators that ran up one of the corners of the atrium.
There were no buttons inside the elevator, but it stopped on a floor
and we got out. We walked a short distance to a door that had Burt's
name on it. The door opened and Burt and Cynthia walked in. Linda and
I walked to the next room, which had my name on it, and entered.
It was an amazing suite. As the door opened, I looked across a
remarkably nice living room and out through a floor-to-ceiling window
that showed a panoramic view of the landscape. To my left was a small
kitchen, to my right a short hallway which opened into a bedroom. I
walked toward the window to absorb the view. About a quarter mile
away was a line of glass buildings, apparently identical to the one I
was standing in. On the ground between me and that line of buildings
were forests, gardens, parks, lakes, trails, streams. I could see
people riding bicycles, kayaking in a river, walking. Off to one side
I could see what appeared to be an amusement park and a stadium.
I looked around the apartment. It was hard to believe, but yesterday
I was living in Terrafoam with no way out. Now I was living in what
appeared to be a 600 square foot suite at a 5-star luxury hotel.
Everything in the room was perfect. There was a basket of fruit and
munchies sitting on the coffee table, and fresh flowers on the
credenza. I opened the card in the flowers, "Here's to your life!
Love, Linda"
Linda said, "The orientation is going to start in about an hour. Why
don't you take a shower and change your clothes. I'll relax here."
She sank into one of the chairs in the living room and closed her
eyes.
When I was through with my shower, I found my closet filled with
clothes that all appeared to fit perfectly. I picked an outfit and
put it on. Walking into the living room I smelled food, which was a
good thing because I was starving.
"How do I look?" I asked.
"Fabulous!" she said. "Very trendy. I got something for us" It was a
extraordinary meal, although I had no idea where it came from.
"Today is going to be an interesting day for you," she said. "It will
also feel a little odd. You've got the time zone change. You are in a
completely different country. There are many new things for you to
absorb. I just want you to relax and let the day flow. If you get
tired, let me know. But I doubt you will get tired today. You had a
good sleep on the plane. Let's get going."
We took the elevator down, past the lobby and then below it. We got
off and entered a large auditorium with hundreds of other people
streaming in as well. Linda led us to a pair of seats and Burt and
Cynthia were already there. The presentation started about three
minutes after we arrived.
The first presentation was remarkable, and it kicked off a series of
events over two days. These events combined video, sound, live
speakers, musical performances, tours, and testimonials to create an
extremely powerful production. It was one of the most inspirational
things I had ever seen or heard. I learned a number of details. For
example, I learned where we were located on the continent of
Australia. I learned that we would be living here for six weeks
during the orientation process. I learned that currently about
400,000 new residents were arriving in Australia every day. I learned
about the daily schedule over the six week period. In orientation we
would be learning about the credit system, housing, the robot
culture, picking products--everything from food to clothing to
vacation packages--interacting with other residents, volunteer
opportunities, physical fitness, careers, the legal system, voting,
etc. It would be a very busy six weeks.
The first two days acted as a general overview of the Australia
project as a whole, but spent a good bit of time covering three
things--the history of the Australia project, the economy of the
project and the core principle of "living your life."
Distilling two days of presentations down into a few sentences,
here's what I learned. As best I could tell, the basic idea behind
the Australia project was to create heaven on earth, or at least the
closest facsimile of heaven possible. Heaven was different for
different people, so your task was to define heaven for yourself and
make it happen. As long as your view of heaven did not unduly impinge
on anyone else's view, or require that you consume massive amounts of
resources at the expense of someone else, you could bring your
version of heaven to reality for yourself. It was stated in the
presentation much more eloquently than that, but that was the gist of
it.
There was a very good explanation of why we needed the orientation
process. We would be entering a society very different from any
society we had ever experienced before. This society offered a huge
array of options, and those options grew constantly. The society was
well-balanced, with a huge pool of people interacting in very human
and humane ways, and there was no desire to throw off that balance by
letting a bunch of new people in who did not know how to participate.
To live our lives, we would be doing it in the context of this
society, and everyone wanted us making a smooth entry. There were
apparently no penalties for mistakes. If the entry was not smooth, we
would be re-oriented.
One part of the presentation featured a speaker who absolutely blew
me away. He was the best motivational speaker I had ever heard. He
asked us to think about a set of basic, personal questions. Like:
What am I passionate about? What do I most enjoy doing? What have I
always wanted to try but had never gotten around to? How did I want
to spend my time? In what sort of environment did I enjoy living?
What kind of people did I like having around me? What kinds of
hobbies did I enjoy? How far did I want to take them? Were there any
that I would want to do constantly for a period of time?
For the first time in my life, in other words, I was told I had
nearly total freedom to do anything I could imagine. All I had to do
was figure out what to imagine. The goal of the orientation process
was to make me aware of all of the possibilities and how to put them
together into my view of heaven.
The presentation ran through a number of examples. Essentially,
everyone in Australia is living on a gigantic, luxury cruise ship.
The trip is already paid for, for life, and you are free to do
whatever you like with your time. The robots are doing all the work,
and you get to partake freely of their output. In other words, for
the first time ever, everyone is truly equal and everyone is truly
free.
Some people on a cruise ship like this would want to spend their time
lying by the pool tanning and sipping margaritas. They are free to do
that. Some people would want to spend a lot of time raising their
children. They are free to do that. Some would want to be bass
fishing all day. That's OK too.
But there would be a tremendous number of people who would want to
fulfill life-long dreams--they would see the unlimited free time of a
life-long cruise as an amazing opportunity. Anyone with creativity
would start creating.
For example, anyone with an artistic bent would start creating art,
because they now have the time and the freedom to do it. Let's say
that you are, or have always wanted to be, a musician. You would get
yourself the instruments and equipment you need to make music. It's
all available--just ask the robots and it is delivered to your door.
There are thousands of options in the catalog. You would have the
time and freedom to expand your talent. You could take classes,
practice, hook up with other musicians, form a band and start
performing.
In the same way, writers would start writing the books that they have
always dreamed of writing. Inventors would work on their inventions,
using materials and equipment provided by the robots. Scholars would
do their scholarly research, finally free to study whatever they
like, using the infinite intellectual resources available on the
network. Scientists would start pursuing their scientific goals using
research facilities provided by the robots. Dancers would get
together and dance, and then perform. People who want to create films
would pool their talents together and create them, or do them solo.
The robots would provide equipment and studio space and let them have
at it. Athletes would train and compete. Programmers would write the
programs they have always dreamed about. Designers would design
whatever they felt like, and then the robots would build it. There
are people who are experts in their various fields--engine design,
scrap booking, fusion reactors, needlepoint--and they would love to
pass their knowledge on to other people. They would write books, make
videos or have live lectures and workshops for people to attend.
People interested in the martial arts would practice them every day.
People interested in video games would play them every day. People
interested in gardening would garden every day. The majority of
people have a talent and, if they had the time, they would cultivate
that talent and use it. The huge cruise ship known as Australia is
the perfect place for every human being to reach his or her full
potential.
It was fascinating to think about this and contrast it with the life
I had known. In the U.S., everyone had to work, and in most cases
"work" meant doing something that a rich person wanted so that the
rich person could get richer. Thinking back to the jobs available at
the turn of the century--you could work scrubbing toilets in a hotel,
or you could flip burgers in a fast food restaurant, or you could
restock shelves and check people out at a retail store, etc.--No one
wanted to do any of these jobs. No one, as a child, ever aspired to
scrub toilets or flip burgers or restock merchandise. But you had to
earn money to live your life, and these were the jobs being offered
to tens of millions of people. People had no choice but to take them,
and in the process a rich person became richer. Then robots replaced
those workers, and they ended up in Terrafoam.
In an economy like that, there were all sorts of musicians who wanted
to do nothing but practice, write music and perform. There were
programmers who wanted to do nothing but program their own creations.
There were scientists who wanted to do cutting-edge research. These
people did not care about money. They simply wanted to do what they
do best. Getting paid for it was a necessary evil for these
folks--they had to have a day job to pay the bills, and then when
they got home from work at night they would indulge their real
talents and their passions.
In Australia, these people could completely fulfill themselves, and
humanity would be much better off because of their contributions.
Creative people want to--need to--create. That is their passion.
Instead of millions of talented people working in jobs that had
nothing to do with their dreams, simply to make ends meet, in
Australia they could follow their dreams.
The goal in Australia is to encourage and nurture creativity and
innovation. This allowed, for example, there to be a nearly infinite
array of clothing designs to choose from. A fashion designer--any
person whose passion and/or lifelong dream involved designing
clothes--would create a design and submit it to the catalog. If the
design was worn by only three people, that was fine. The robots
custom-made three copies of the design and delivered them. Or a
design could be wildly popular and worn by millions. In that case,
the designer gained a great deal of notoriety, won accolades and
awards, and so on. This designer would appear in design shows and
people would breathlessly await new designs. At the same time,
another designer could have a very small group of passionate
followers. Both designers had the chance to do their thing, and any
new designer could break out into the mainstream at any moment simply
by drawing something that caught the public's attention. It meant an
amazing level of creativity and innovation in every product
category--food, housing, architecture, vacation resorts, restaurants,
furniture. Whether it was basic research or final consumer products,
innovation was everywhere. The innovators had the ability to take
their research/inventions/ideas as far as they could.
The space elevators were a good example of a larger-scale process.
Millions of people had said that they would gladly take a trip to a
weightless hotel in orbit, and they were willing to contribute their
credits up front to make it possible. With the credits available, the
robots allocated the resources for research and design. Scientists,
engineers and designers interested in the project worked on it simply
to have a part in it and make it a reality. Then the robots built the
space elevators to meet the demand.
When you thought about it, this made a lot of sense. For example, the
American moon shot was one of the most innovative programs ever seen
in the United States. Thousands of scientists, engineers and
designers came together and worked 18-hours-a-day to make the moon
shot happen. Did they do it for the money? No. None of them became
millionaires. They did it because they loved it and believed in the
idea. Einstein did not create the theory of relativity for the money.
The Wright Brothers did not create the airplane for the money.
Creative people create for the joy of it.
In other words, Australia was a permanent vacation resort for some of
the residents. For creative people, Australia was an amazing
intellectual playground. This meant that innovation was progressing
at an astonishing rate.
Each day, robots cleaned my apartment, changed the sheets and so on.
It was just like a luxury hotel. Food and drinks got delivered as
requested. If I wanted room service Linda would order it. If I wanted
to cook for myself, I could do that. If I wanted to eat out, Linda
and I would go to a restaurant--there were thousands of them, all
different kinds, scattered throughout the habitat. We would decide
what we were in the mood for and she would take us right to the
restaurant. Sometimes we could walk or ride a bike. Other times we
took a "car" like the one that delivered us from the airport. The
food and drinks were all essentially free because the robots were
growing and processing all the food from free resources. This concept
of "free" was just like on a cruise ship. Once you bought your
ticket, everything was free on the cruise. This cruise just happened
to last a lifetime.
At the end of the second day of orientation, we were told that day
three would cover the Vertebrane system. Details on this system were
sketchy, but I knew it had something to do with accessing the network
and ordering things.
On the third day, Linda woke me as usual with her arrival. It was a
very nice way to wake up in the morning.
"By tomorrow you should be adjusted to the time zone and waking up on
your own." She said.
"What's on the schedule for today?" I asked.
"We are actually going to spend some time together today." Linda
said. "We are going to talk about the Vertebrane system."
"I am full of questions about it." I said. Obviously this system was
important, because it seemed like the tool you used to request almost
anything from the robots. "How does it work? For that matter, how do
I access it?"
"Sit down and let me show you something." said Linda. "It will help
you to understand."
We sat down on the couch together.
"Did you know that this window is adjustable?" she asked.
"No." I replied. In the bedroom, the floor-to-ceiling window actually
had drapes. They were part of the decor. But in the living room the
window was a seamless floor-to-ceiling sheet of crystal clear glass.
There was no frame or border of any kind. There was no obvious
control for adjusting it.
Linda said, "It can be frosted." And the window frosted. "Or it can
be opaque." It turned black, and the lighting in the room came up to
compensate. "I can take the lighting down or bring it up," She said
as the lights adjusted. "It can even look like stained glass," She
said, and the window took on a modern stained glass design. "Or
paisley wallpaper." And it became what appeared to be a solid
wall-papered wall instead of a sheet of glass. Then it became the
familiar clear window again.
"How are you doing that?" I asked. She had touched nothing. She
hadn't really moved. She was speaking, but the window often changed
as she was speaking the sentence, almost as though it were following
her thoughts rather than her words.
"I'm using the Vertebrane system. Ask me anything." Linda said.
"OK, What size shoes do I wear?" I asked.
"We don't have shoe sizes here. Each shoe is custom made for the
wearer. Next." She said. "Try to ask me a factual question."
"How tall is the Empire State Building?" I asked.
"1,472 feet to the tip of the antenna. 1,250 feet if you don't
include the antenna. Next." She said.
"In metric?" I asked.
"448 meters and 391 meters. Next." She said.
"In light years?" I asked.
"About 1.5 light microseconds." She answered. "Next."
"How do I know that you are right?" I asked.
"Take my word for it. Or ask me something that you can verify right
here." She said.
"How wide is this room?" I asked.
"16.5 of your shoes. Check it." She answered.
I checked it by pacing off the room. She was correct. "Lucky guess."
I said.
"Next." She said.
"Will we ever make love together?" I asked.
"I cannot predict the future." She said. "But I would say that the
probability of that event is high."
I looked at her and she looked at me for a moment.
"Ask me something that is impossible for me to know." She said.
I thought about it. Burt had a tattoo on his butt. I knew about it
because I had seen it several times in the showers in Terrafoam, but
there is no way Linda would know.
"What is tattooed on Burt's butt?" I asked.
She paused for a moment. "The name Angie in a heart." She said. "On
the left cheek."
I paused for a long time.
"How are you doing this?" I asked.
"That is what we are going to talk about today..."
# Chapter 7
Linda looked at me and started to explain, "The Vertebrane system
lets me access the entire information network here in the Australia
project. It is like a network connection, a telephone, a TV, a
computer and several other devices all rolled into one. You asked me
what was tattooed on Burt's butt. I used the Vertebrane system to get
the answer."
"Yes." I said, "But how did you get the answer?"
"Let's say you were holding a telephone in your hand. How would you
get the answer?" Linda asked.
"I guess I would call Burt and ask him." I replied.
"Right. But Burt doesn't have a phone, so I called Cynthia and I
asked her. She asked Burt. If I thought the answer was on the
network, I could do a search instead."
"But how did you do it? You never moved. You never picked up a phone.
You didn't do anything--how did you call Cynthia?"
"This is the interesting part about the Vertebrane system. I am going
to explain it to you, but I want you to relax while I do it.
Different people take this differently. That's why I am sitting here
with you privately, telling you about it one-on-one. There's just no
way to talk about it in a big group during orientation, because
everyone reacts differently to it. I want you to understand that the
Vertebrane system is a good system. It is the most advanced
communication and networking system ever created. But it freaks some
people out when they hear about it. My job is to help you get past
that." Linda was looking at me with an expression that was one of
serenity. She just wanted to talk to me about this thing, whatever it
was.
"I won't freak out." I said. "Just answer me one thing. Where is this
system? How do you access it? This has been a question since I got
here. In this room there is no computer, no TV, no telephone. I would
expect my room to be filled with electronic devices, but I have not
seen a single device since I got here."
"That was the problem that people started to notice. The more
advanced everything got, the more devices you needed. Think about the
state of electronics in the U.S.--computer, TV, telephone, PDA, GPS,
stereo system, portable music players, video players, video
recorders, cameras... At some point the number of devices becomes
insane. Sure you can integrate some of them together, but then there
are compromises. Plus there are the problems of screen sizes,
multiple screens, batteries..." Linda explained. "The Australia
Project, with its level of innovation, was producing more and more
devices in myriad forms and it was becoming quite unwieldy."
"So how did you solve the problem?" I asked.
"We decided it would be easier to build in all of these devices."
Linda answered.
"Build them in where?"
"Inside of us." Linda replied. "I know that sounds foreign, because
you've never thought of 'devices' in this way before. You have always
thought of devices being outside your body. When they are outside,
though, they are always getting in the way. You have to carry them,
you have to put them in pockets. You lose them. You have to hold them
in your hand to use them, and you only have two hands. If you build
them in, all of those problems go away."
"That actually makes sense." I said. "The whole idea of using a hand
to hold a phone to your head seems awkward. But I have a couple of
questions. First of all, where are the devices? I mean, you don't
look lumpy or anything. Are they in your torso?"
"No, they are not in my torso." Linda smiled.
"And how do you push the buttons or read the screens?" I asked.
"That's one of the most interesting parts about the Vertebrane
system." Linda said.
"What?" I asked.
"Pushing the buttons and reading the screens." Linda replied.
"So how do you do it?" I asked.
"Think about it this way. What's the biggest problem with screens?"
Linda asked.
"I don't know. What, they are never big enough?" I replied.
"Very good. That's the biggest problem with screens. We can make
screens as big as buildings now, but they are really hard to take
with you. In any sort of portable device, the screen is always too
small. And what if you are walking?" Linda asked.
"Yes, that's a problem. You can't see the screen if you are walking
because it jiggles too much. And you run into things when you look
down at it." I answered.
"Exactly. So here is the simple solution--what if you painted the
image right onto the retina?" Linda asked.
"That sounds like it would work." I replied. "How do you do it?"
"It turns out you can't do it." Linda said. "It just doesn't work.
You can try putting some sort of retinal projector in a pair of
glasses or something, but it gets extremely cumbersome. When you are
running the glasses still bounce a little and it is distracting. And
there is still no way to push the buttons."
"So how do you solve the problem?"
Linda took a deep breath, "I want you to imagine something, and think
about how your body works. What if you tapped right into the optic
nerves? What if you pumped images straight into the visual cortex of
the brain, overlaid on top of the scene coming in through your eyes?"
"You can do that? You can tap right into the optical nerves?" I was
nearly speechless.
"Yes, we can do that. We can also tap into the auditory nerves coming
from the ears, along with taste and smell nerves from the tongue and
nose. We can pump artificial sensory perceptions right into these
main sensory nerve bundles as they enter the brain." Linda explained.
"Holy shit. What about touch?" I asked.
"We handle touch as well. The way we do that is to hook right into
the spinal cord. That lets us pick up all touch sensations, and also
gain control of all the muscles as well." Linda said.
"What?"
"I know it sounds farfetched. But we actually put shunts into every
nerve pathway heading to the brain. And we do that whether it is a
sensory nerve fiber heading toward the brain or a muscle control
fiber heading out." She explained.
"How do you do that?"
"For the spinal cord, what they do is they replace three of the upper
cervical vertebrae in your spine. Right about here." She touched the
back of my neck, and then showed me where on the back of her neck.
"That's where the computer system is embedded--in the three new
vertebrae they install. There's also the power module and the
wireless transmitter."
"Inside of you right now?" I asked.
"Right here." She held the back of her neck.
"Why is there no scar?" I asked, looking at her neck.
"The surgical procedures in the Australia Project are just as
innovative as everything else." She said.
"Where does the power come from? Do you have to recharge yourself
every night?" I asked, only half joking.
"No. There's a fuel cell in the third vertebra, and it uses glucose
in the blood for power. It has a nice side benefit--it helps you keep
your weight down. That's one reason why there are no fat people in
the Australia Project."
"Oh my God. I knew there had to be a reason for that. I figured that
there were forced feeding limitations or something. No one could ever
go on a luxury cruise and stay thin."
"No, the Vertebrane system actually takes care of your weight for
you. But that's a bonus. It has nothing to do with the real goal of
the Vertebrane system." Linda said.
"So let me see if I have this straight. You are saying that surgeons
replace three of the upper vertebrae in your spine." I said.
"Yes." She said. "Actually it is robotic surgeons, but yes." She said.
"And they sever the spinal cord and essentially reroute it into a
computer in one of those new vertebrae." I said.
"Yes. Very good." She confirmed.
"And they also tap into the major sensory nerves, like the optical
nerves and the auditory nerves." I said.
"Exactly." She replied.
"You are blowing my mind." I said. I had to close my eyes for a
minute. "Is that how you are wired right now?"
"Yes, that is how I am wired. And let me tell you, it is fantastic."
She said.
"How does it feel?" I asked.
"It is very freeing." She said.
"How so?" I asked.
"Let's say that I want to talk to Cynthia. I can call her and talk to
her. Or I can send her a letter. To call her, I just think through it
to connect. Then it is just like we are talking to each other
normally. I hear her voice as though it is in my ear. What's
happening is that when she thinks about talking, the Vertebrane
system intercepts the signals and sends them to the network
wirelessly. They are transmitted to me, and my computer sends the
words she is speaking into my auditory nerves, overlaid on the
ambient sound around me. Or I can turn the ambient sound off if I
want to. That's great if you are in a noisy place."
"So you can turn your ears off?" I asked. "That would be cool. There
are lots of times I have wanted to close my ears just like I close my
eyes."
"There are a lot of people who meditate by turning off everything.
They turn off sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Their brains are
completely disconnected from the world. It is like you are floating
in a complete isolation chamber. I don't like it myself unless I am
trying to fall asleep, but lots of people swear by it."
"What else can you do?" I asked.
"Everyone listens to music this way. It streams from the network
straight into your auditory nerves. The sound is perfect. You can
make it as loud or as soft was you like. And it can always play in
the background. You just turn it down when a call comes in." She
said.
"I never thought about that." I said.
"Another thing that Vertebrane can do is translate for you. If you
are taking a call from a person who speaks in a different language,
the system simply translates what they say into English and sends the
translated version in on your auditory nerve instead of the original
version. That way, everyone in the Australia Project can talk to
everyone else. Language is never a problem."
"How smart is it?" I asked.
"It is amazing actually. For example, let's say you are in a room
with a lot of people, and someone is talking too loudly and making it
hard to hear. You can ask the system to cut him out, and his voice
disappears from the audio track you are hearing."
"What else can it do?" I asked.
"The visual side is where it is the most amazing. It has different
modes. Remember when we were in the airport and you asked me 'How did
we get here?'" She asked.
"Yes." I said. "But now I can see where this is heading."
"Right. I simply ask the system where I am supposed to be for the
flight, and when. In my interface, the way the system tells me where
to go is by painting big arrows on the walls. No one else can see
them, but when I look at the world, I see arrows painted on the
walls. And I like lots of arrows so I never get confused. Then when
we got inside the plane and the seats were nearby, they glowed.
That's how I knew where our seats were. You can set up the interface
in nearly any way. Some people like arrows on the walls. Some like
lines painted on the floor. Some like a big golden retriever who
walks in front of you and then you follow. And it can be
anything--golden retriever, elf, dragon, floating orb, whatever. Some
people go for a voice interface, where the voice tells you to turn
left or right."
"As soon as you mention voices, you know what I am going to ask." I
said. There was a chill running up my spine.
"Yes I do. Let me be very clear on this--this is not Manna, or
anything close to it. There is a huge difference between Vertebrane
and Manna. Manna tells you to scrub a toilet, and you have no choice.
Manna times you as you scrub it and shocks you through the shock
collar when you don't do it fast enough. That is insane--it is no
different from slavery, with a computer system owned by rich people
as the master." She said.
"I agree." I replied.
"In the Vertebrane system, you are always in control. You can ask for
help--directions for example--and the system helps you. You can ask a
question and the system will answer it. You ask the system to play a
movie or make a call or whatever. You can even ask the system to
disconnect your brain from sensory input so you can get a good
night's sleep, and then wake you up at 7. The system will do that.
You are always in control of Vertebrane, rather than vice versa." She
explained.
"That is good to know. And actually this is sounding very cool." I
said. "How do I watch a movie if I have Vertebrane?"
"There are a couple different kinds of movies now. There's old-style
screen movies, and people still watch a lot of those because they are
classics. With Vertebrane you can sit down or lie down and the movie
plays through your vision system. You disconnect your eyes and all
you see is the movie in that case. Or you can have kind of a
picture-in-picture thing, where the movie is overlaid within the
scene that your eyes are naturally seeing. That way you can go for a
walk and watch the movie while you are walking. But all the new
movies are immersive now. You not only see the scenes, but you also
taste, touch and feel them. You are completely immersed in the movie.
Many of these movies are interactive, and when they do that they're
kind of a merge between a movie and virtual space." She said.
"Virtual space?" I asked.
"Immersive environments. Artificial worlds. Whatever you want to call
it. We call it VS here" She said.
"How does virtual space work?" I asked.
"Virtual space is an offshoot of gaming." She said. "You saw it in
the U.S. to some degree--games got more and more realistic on the
screen. Now imagine a game world where it's not about screens and
stereo speakers. Instead, you are completely immersed in the game
world. It includes sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, and it is
totally realistic. You essentially disconnect your brain from your
real body and plug it into a virtual body in the game's virtual
world. Then people started creating virtual worlds simply for the
sake of creating them. You can experience just about anything in
virtual space now, and you can do it alone or with a million friends.
You can be Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, or a cowboy in the old
west or whatever."
"What else can Vertebrane do?" I asked.
"You access the network through it. Basically you can access any
fact, image, movie, song. You can also experience what someone else
is experiencing--a person streams all their sensory data to you, and
you both experience it simultaneously. It can be one person sharing
the experience, or a thousand. Or you can publish an experience and
other people can play it whenever they want. Vertebrane also
exercises for you. And it records your entire life to the network, so
you can go back and review things that have happened in the past and
replay them. It can do all sorts of things."
"Wait a minute. Your entire life?" I asked.
"Yes. Basically your entire sensory feed, along with all your muscle
actions, get recorded every minute of every day. Then if you want to
go back and relive something, you can. It's like a complete diary of
your entire life." She explained.
"Is that public?" I asked.
"No. Well, sort of. There are the refs, but they are the only thing
accessing it besides you, unless you publish something." She said.
"The refs?" I asked.
"The referees. They monitor things and prevent problems." She
clarified.
"How so?" I asked.
"They are like referees in any sport. They watch things, and flag you
if you break the rules or are about to break the rules." She said.
"They watch everything?"
"The refs are robots. They watch your sensory feed as it is coming in
and look for rule violations. For example, let's say you start
screaming obscenities at someone in public. The refs would flag that
and detain you. It's against the rules to scream at someone in
public, mainly because no one wants to be around when it happens."
"That makes sense. Did you say they can flag you if you are about to
break a rule?" I asked.
"Yes." She said.
"How can they know you are about to break a rule?" I asked.
"Let's say you have picked up a bat, you are running toward someone
and your muscles are getting the bat in position to swing it. A ref
would look at that and say, 'there's a good chance someone is going
to get hurt here.' The ref would shut down the person with the bat."
"Shut down?"
"It just disconnects your brain from your muscles and the ref takes
control. Then you are detained to review the situation and retrain."
She said.
"That must really cut down on crime." I said.
"You cannot imagine. And there is always a complete record after any
crime is committed, so there is no question about innocence or guilt.
Prosecution is trivial if you are guilty, and exoneration is instant
if you are not. It's a little creepy the first time a ref warns you
about something. It is sort of like a lifeguard yelling at you at the
pool for something you thought was OK. It's embarrassing, at least to
me. But then the ref explains the rule, you can ask questions about
it and then you move on."
"How often do the refs flag you?" I asked.
"It can be pretty often in the beginning, but I haven't heard from a
ref in over a year I'd say. It's been a long time."
"Where do the rules come from?" I asked.
"We make them. Everyone is involved. They'll spend almost a week on
that during orientation--it's a big part of living here."
"And what were you saying about exercise? How can a computer system
help with exercise?" I asked.
"This sounds a little weird, but here's how it works. The biggest
problem with strenuous exercise is that it's no fun. It hurts. But
strenuous exercise really helps on the health side. People in the
Australia Project are now living 30 years longer than people in the
U.S., and exercise is a part of that. Athletes are OK with the pain,
but most normal people have no desire to be in pain for an hour or
more. So... someone figured out a solution. What you do is disconnect
your brain from sensory input and watch a movie or talk to people or
handle mail or read a book or whatever for an hour. During that time,
the Vertebrane system exercises your body for you. It takes your body
through a complete aerobic workout that's a lot more strenuous than
most people would tolerate on their own. You don't feel a thing, but
your body stays in great shape."
"You are kidding me."
"No, I am not kidding. It is fantastic to have a body that is working
at peak athletic performance. You've got to feel it to believe it. I
am in fantastic shape. Here, feel my arm muscles." She offered me her
arm, and she was surprisingly lean and muscular. I'd never really
paid any attention to it, but she was in great shape.
"Let me see if I've got this straight. You disconnect your brain, and
you--your brain--can do whatever you want on the network. Call, read,
play games, whatever. Meantime a computer controls your body. So your
body is essentially a robot. Is that right?" I asked.
"Yes, that's right. Your Vertebrane system is driving your body.
Meanwhile your brain is off doing whatever." She explained.
"So who am I talking to now? Am I talking to Linda's brain, or to the
Vertebrane computer?" I asked.
"Ah. I see where you are going. You are talking to me. It's against
the rules to have Vertebrane drive your body like that when you are
with someone else. That would be way too confusing. If I am with you,
I am driving my body. The refs would flag it otherwise."
"That's reassuring." I said.
"When we are together, you are always talking to me, myself and I. No
artificial additives. What else would you like to know?" She asked.
"My God, I could ask you questions all day. It would probably be
easier to simply get it myself and try the Vertebrane system out."
"I'm glad to hear you say that!" she said. "We can have it done
today."
"Today? Are you kidding?"
"No. It's minor surgery. You can be out in an hour and you won't feel
a thing." She said.
"What??? How can replacing three vertebrae and having every major
nerve fiber severed be painless?" I asked.
"Well, think about it. First, medicine is highly advanced here. But
second, any pain signals start routing through the Vertebrane system
once it's installed, and Vertebrane can mask any pain. There's no
such thing as unnecessary pain once you have Vertebrane installed.
You'll never have a headache again."
"If we can do it today, let's go for it. I have got to try this out."
I had once been a game fanatic, and just the thought of an immersive
game was enough to sign me up.
We went to the clinic. Linda held my hand as they put me under, and
when I woke up...
# Chapter 8
I woke up as if I had taken a light nap. No grogginess really.
Everything was completely normal. Linda was sitting in a chair nearby
with her eyes closed. She was reading her email or walking around in
virtual space, for all I knew.
"Did they do anything?" I asked.
She opened her eyes. "Yes, of course. They put in the whole
Vertebrane system." She said.
"Where is it? Nothing is different."
"It's there," She said. "It defaults to pass-through mode. Now you
have to learn how to use it. That will take a day or two. I'll take
you over so you can start training."
It turned out to be incredibly easy to use. And once you learned the
basics, it could do an amazing range of things. Just like Linda had
said, you could use the Vertabrane system to talk to people anywhere
in the Australia Project, to get answers to any question from the
network, to play totally immersive games. You could meet with people
in VS, and some of the meeting places were quite bizarre. You could
meet in weightlessness in a space station. You could meet underwater.
You could meet while walking under the canopy of a redwood forest.
Linda's favorite "place" to meet was flying through the air, like
Superman. In her Virtual Space, you could fly in the traditional
arms-forward Superman pose, or you could stick your arms out and use
them like wings to control your flight. Or you could ride on a flying
carpet. The flying sensation was remarkable.
You also ordered everything through the Vertebrane system. You could
try on clothes, see and taste food, try out products, choose housing
and vacation options. It made shopping incredibly easy, and you knew
exactly what you were going to get.
The funny thing was that Vertabrane was like every other technology I
had ever used. During the first couple of days it was miraculous.
Each new feature was surprising and amazing. But after a week or two
you got used to it and it became a part of your life. Think about any
technology--the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the
refrigerator, the home computer--These were all miracles the first
day people saw them and used them, but a week later they were passé.
By the end of orientation I didn't even know Vertebrane was there--it
seemed completely normal to me.
One thing I did think about more and more was the security of this
whole system. Computers had been plagued with bugs and viruses since
the beginning, but the Australia Project seemed to suffer from none
of these problems. One day I asked Linda about it.
"What's to stop someone from taking over the system and turning us
into an army of zombies?" I asked.
"I'm no engineer," Linda said, "But here's the best explanation I've
heard. Why can't someone take over your brain?"
"What do you mean?"
"Why has no one ever been able to take over billions of human brains
and create an army of zombies that way?"
"Well, it's inside of me. How would they take it over?" I replied.
"Why can't they just upload a program into your brain, and that
program takes over your brain and turns you into a zombie a minute
later? Why does that never happen?" She asked.
"Because there is no way to 'upload' a program into my brain. And my
brain does not execute programs anyway. It is not a computer." I
replied.
"Yes." She said. "Everything you learn comes in through your eyes and
ears. It passes through your conscious mind one piece at a time, and
your conscious mind evaluates it. Then your conscious mind 'executes'
the things you learn consciously, thinking about each one. If someone
were to try to teach you to cut off your own arm, your conscious mind
would reject that as ridiculous when the lesson came in, and your
brain would certainly never cause you to cut off your arm except in
the most extreme situations. The Vertabrane system is operating in
the same way. It is learning things, not running programs. It acts
consciously rather than being 'programmed', and it has a far more
rigid moral code than most human beings do. The Vertebrane system
never blindly 'executes' a program, so it cannot be taken over.
That's true of all of the robots here. The Australia Project would
have collapsed long ago if this were just a bunch of computers
blindly executing code that humans had written. That is how things
were in the beginning, or course, but we advanced beyond it fairly
quickly."
Once Vertebrane was installed, orientation became much easier.
Everything happened in VS and we covered a huge amount of material
over the remaining five weeks--the economic system, government,
voting, housing, credits, travel, crime, punishment, rules,
interpersonal interactions, referees, education, ordering things,
designing new things, news, awards, social responsibilities and so
on. There were lessons on the nine core principles, what they meant
and the effects they had on the community as a whole. There was a lot
of emphasis placed on treating other people with respect, and
understanding the basic humanity of the people around you.
It was very interesting to compare this new world to the world I had
known all through my life. The biggest difference, of course, was the
economic system. It had effects on everything--the psychology of
people living in Australia, the way people worked with each other,
what people bought and why, the level of innovation, the way
resources were allocated, etc. One of the more interesting features
of the economy from a psychological standpoint was the fact that no
one had more than you did, or less, and everyone knew it. That
removed entire layers of negative emotions. The fact that you could
have pretty much anything you wanted, anytime you wanted it, meant
that you placed far less importance on material things. You would
expect that, given essentially free access to everything, people
would go nuts. Actually, the opposite happened. Suddenly there was no
condition of "want" or "envy," so people had no need to show off.
This will sound surprising, but one of the bigger differences was the
lack of advertising. The robots did not care whether you bought one
style of clothing or another, ate in one restaurant or another, lived
in one kind of housing or another... It was all the same to them.
Therefore, there was no need for advertising. If a fad caught
on--whether it was a song, a book, a style, a pair of shoes, a
restaurant--it all happened by word of mouth. And everyone knew that.
If you tried something and it was good, you told your friends about
it.
Innovation was incredibly interesting and important, and in
orientation we discussed it extensively. I had never really thought
of innovation as a part of society. Here it was actually something
that people thought about and talked about as part of the "better and
better" principle. But the reason for the discussion was surprising.
What became clear after several weeks is that a big part of the
Australia Project was living, and understanding what living meant to
you. Perhaps for the first time, a huge group of people had the
freedom to decide exactly how they wanted to live their lives, and
then make it happen. A big part of orientation was helping people
realize that fundamental feature of the Australia Project, and help
you work through the questions. It reminded me a little of the
process of setting an animal raised in the zoo free in the wild. If
you've been caged your entire life, actual freedom is a completely
new experience.
Every single person in the Australia Project was different, and no
one focused on one thing exclusively, but there were some general
patterns. Some people chose to focus their lives on friends and
family. For example, lots of people with children wanted to spend
time with the kids. Many others had extensive networks of friends and
spent much of their time with friends socializing in a variety of
ways. Many people loved to travel, and spent a great deal of time
traveling to different parts of the country and the world. Some
people enjoyed art--music, writing, painting, sculpture, dance,
etc.--and spent a great deal of their time at their art. Athletes
spent their time training and competing. For each different person, a
different type of lifestyle brought fulfillment.
A surprising number of people found fulfillment in creating new
things--inventors, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, designers,
architects. In the Australia Project, these people could find true
fulfillment. Because of the "better and better" principle, the
Australia Project set quite a bit of its resources aside to help
people interested in innovation. All "known" product categories were
under constant improvement. All unknowns were being researched.
For example, take any "known" product--shoes, clothes, food, housing,
furniture, appliances, housing, restaurants, parks, etc. People were
constantly coming up with new ideas to make them better and better.
For example, if you came up with a new style of clothing, you would
submit it and the robots would put it in the catalog. There was no
way to know whether your new style would resonate with 100 people or
a million, and the robots didn't care. The only way to find out was
to let people have access to it. If someone had a new idea for a
restaurant, the robots would simulate it and ask 1,000 people about
their level of interest. If there was any interest at all, the robots
would try one copy of the restaurant out. If it took off, they would
make copies of it in different regions. In this way, restaurants were
constantly changing and improving. The same thing was true of
housing--there were thousands of housing styles, and you could move
whenever you felt like it. If someone had a new way of doing things,
the robots would try it out.
Another thing that helped innovation was the elimination of profit.
In the Australia Project, the robots made everything and delivered
it. The only "price" for anything you wanted was for the resources
consumed. The robots could make one copy or a million copies of
anything in the catalog, and they did not need to make a "profit"
from any of it.
In a profit-driven society, a huge range of innovative products never
saw the light of day because they could not make a profit. A
technology or a product had to have enough people using it to cover
the costs of the people working on the product, the advertising, the
legal bills, the rent, etc. That meant that a lot of people had to be
using a product in order to bring the price down to a reasonable
level. In the Australia Project, that restriction was eliminated.
There were no advertising costs for example. Production and resources
were free. Anything that anyone could conceive could be produced, and
it would reach its natural audience. The size of the audience did not
matter. This meant a much wider range of products and services.
There was a relatively small but highly regarded segment of the
population that got its fulfillment from fundamental scientific
research. This is the kind of research that figured out things like
fusion power, the origin of the universe and new materials.
Throughout history, these people had never worked for monetary reward
as their primary incentive. They worked instead for the joy of
scientific discovery, and for peer recognition. This was the same
kind of thing driving the open source movement at the turn of the
century. The Australia Project encouraged the creative work of
scientists, engineers, programmers, etc. by devoting a large block of
the resources to them. They could work in groups or individually, and
they could work in their personal areas of interest. Because the
scientists and engineers had the resources and freedom to work on
whatever they wanted, the creative process accelerated. The
intellectual playground offered by the Australia Project was perfect
for them.
In this way, each person in the Australia Project was able to seek
and find a truly fulfilling lifestyle. Those who wanted to lounge
around all day did so. Those who wanted to answer the mysteries of
the universe did that. If you decided you wanted to completely change
your lifestyle at any point, you could do that too.
One of the more surprising divisions in the society was the
difference between the Vites and the Peas. There was a very large
group of people who, given a choice between the virtual world and the
physical world, preferred to live their lives virtually. They were
known as Vites. Burt, for example, became a Vite--completely virtual.
He lived his life almost entirely in the virtual world. Vertebrane
took care of everything physical for him--Eating, showering, using
the bathroom, exercising. This freed Burt's brain to connect to the
virtual world 24 hours a day.
Because of their lifestyle, Vites used practically no resources. All
they needed was a little space to live in, room to exercise, some
simple, healthy foods and water. Nearly every minute of their lives
was spent in virtual space. When I spent time with Burt, it was
always in VS.
The other half of the population lived mostly in the physical world,
and used Vertebrane as an accessory to their lives. We were known as
Peas. Linda, Cynthia and I were Peas. Linda's preferred mode for
getting together was in virtual space--She was hooked on flying. But
for the most part, Peas spent a majority of their time in the real
world. They met people, traveled and lived their lives in the
physical realm.
After orientation, I got to spend a fair amount of time with Burt in
his virtual world. He showed me around his favorite places, as well
as new spaces as they became available. The big news in the Vite
community was "Vite racks". For a Vite, the human body was a
distraction more than anything else. Vite racks gave Vites the chance
to discard their bodies. The brain was all that remained, and it
consumed just 2.5 liters of space on a rack. The big advantage of a
Vite rack was longevity. Current research was showing that the brain
could last decades longer if it was maintained and managed in the
optimal conditions of a rack. When a Vite wanted to enter the
physical world, he or she could have his or her brain loaded into a
variety of robotic bodies. But Vites rarely if ever needed a physical
presence. The research was probably 4 or 5 years away from
perfection, but it was going to be a huge development once it was
complete.
Personally, I found the whole idea of a Vite rack creepy. I kind of
liked my body. In fact, I liked everything about the physical world
that made up the Australia project. After looking through the
thousands of housing options available and touring many of them, I
settled on a lifestyle that surprised me. There was a community set
up to mimic many of the features of the original town of
Williamsburg. People worked together to build their own houses, grow
their own food, make their own clothes, practice simple crafts and
trade with one another. The people living in this town were
wonderful--honest, industrious, friendly, down-to-earth. The things
we did together were simple and straightforward. I could still visit
my friends in virtual space when I wanted to, but I often kept
Vertebrane in pass-through mode for days at a time.
It was amazing to me that technology had brought us full circle like
this. I was living in the most amazing civilization known to mankind.
As a species we had conquered nearly every want or need of the human
condition. Food, water, clothing and shelter, as well as every
imaginable type of entertainment or endeavor, were available in such
abundance that everyone had a nearly infinite supply. Technology had
advanced to the point where I could take an elevator ride to space,
and was nearly to the point where my brain could be removed from my
body so I could live a completely virtual life.
But with all of this technology available, I choose to live my life
by setting time back 300 years and living a very simple, completely
physical lifestyle. I grew my own food and built my own simple house
with my own hands. I was able to be a kind grandfather to dozens of
children in the village, to make clay pots in the sun and to grow
flowers in my garden outside my bedroom window. I was as happy and
fulfilled as I ever had been at any time in my entire life--my life
was perfect, because it was exactly the way I wanted it to be.
Giving each human being the freedom to reach this level of deeply
personal contentment was a remarkable achievement.
tags: collapse,ebook,sci-fi
# Footnotes
(TXT) [1] Manna (wikipedia)
# Tags
(DIR) collapse
(DIR) ebook
(DIR) sci-fi