Quotes 7-23-2014
by Miles Raymer
“As a wave passes through a rug that is being shaken, driving before it a front of grit, fleas, apple seeds, tobacco-ashes, pubic hairs, scab-heads, &c., so the expansion of London across the defenseless green countryside pushed before it all who had been jarred loose by Change, or who simply hadn’t been firmly tied down to begin with. A farmer living out in the green pastures north of the city might notice the buildings creeping his way, year by year, but not know that his pasture was soon to become part of London until drunks, footpads, whores, and molly-boys began to congregate under his windows.”
––The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 116
“The reality is the IoT is both a job killer and a source of employment. In the long run, the smart IoT infrastructure––the Communications Internet, the Energy Internet, and the Logistics Internet––is going to carry on much of the economic activity of civilization with a small supervisory and professional work force.
In the short and mid terms, however, the massive build-out of the IoT infrastructure in every locality and region of the world is going to give rise to one last surge of mass wage and salaried labor that will run for 40 years, spanning two generations. Transforming the global energy regime from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable energies is extremely labor intensive and will require millions of workers and spawn thousands of new businesses. Retrofitting and converting hundreds of millions of existing buildings into green micropower plants and erecting millions of new positive micropower buildings will likewise require tens of millions of workers and open up new entrepreneurial opportunities for energy-saving companies (ESCOs), smart-construction companies, and green appliance producers. Installing hydrogen and other storage technologies across the entire economic infrastructure to manage the flow of green electricity will generate comparable mass employment and new businesses as well. The reconfiguration of the world’s electricity grid into an Energy Internet will generate millions of installation jobs and give birth to thousands of clean Web app start-up companies. And finally, rebooting the transport sector from the internal-combustion engine to electric and fuel-cell vehicles will necessitate the makeover of the nation’s road system and fueling infrastructure. Installing millions of plug-in electric fueling outlets along roads and in every parking space is labor-intensive work that will employ a sizable workforce.”
––The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, by Jeremy Rifkin, pg. 266-7