Re: [DIYbio] SynBio and International Development

> how can
> we expect high-tech progress when these folks are still shifting their
> cars manually!

Manual shift cars were the norm in Ireland until about 5 years ago, I'd
wager. I'd still say only about 50% of cars on the road, maybe less, are
automatics. Many people don't like automatic transmission; personally, I
generally detest it. The only car I've ever driven that had A) Effective
automatic transmission and B) a good reason not to be manual is the
Toyota Prius.

Personally, I don't like them because they can reduce efficiency
(although I'll grant you they make up for enough terrible drivers that
on balance perhaps they save fuel..), and because of the slight lag in
response between my pushing the pedal and the car taking of from a stop.
That can actually be a hazard!

Anyways, griping over. What I'd really like to say on that score is that
"development" doesn't follow a homogenous path; the popular example is
that mobile communications access has now leapfrogged access to clean
water around the world, and people are choosing high tech over baseline
low-tech fairly consistently. As odd as it looks, the future citizen is
as likely to live in a mud hut and own an Android and work online as she
is to be a farm labourer or workhouse slave (following the European
"development" path).

> The same theme lots
> of sci-fi clone revolutions play on, some outsider allows a clone to
> see the way civilized humans live, and the clone get's pissed off at
> their master and starts a rebellion.

And then there's "A Brave New World", where a 'primitive' human from a
"reservation" is brought into modern society and is disgusted by the
inhumane way in which they live and treat one another, and can't take it
at all. The wealthy always imagine their life is the perfect life, and
the poor will envy them: "On a mange brioche", to borrow the common
misattribution to Marie Antoinette.

The reality is pretty different; while it's true that people
instinctively desire items that designate status, status is designated
differently by culture, social class, or social group. Even within
pretty homogenous cultures, some groups will assign massive status to
ownership of a McGuffin, and others will consider it nonsensical or
wasteful; iPhones are an obvious example of such disputed
status-McGuffins, as are Prada clothing items, Swiss watches and
solid-gold pens.

So, we assume that "international development" means "accessing and
owning the things that we already have as westerners", and are surprised
when people elsewhere choose differently to us based on vast cultural
differences.

> Most people love mechanization and automation, but there
> are exceptions such as when it could mean job loss "a robot took my
> job!", or when withholding technology allows some party to remain in
> greater power.

I read a great essay by someone who was dissecting our relationship to
robot labour. It can be bullet-pointed nicely:
* We generally fantasise about futures where robots do all our hard
work, freeing us from menial labour to pursue more uniquely human
endeavours like art and science.
* We already live in a future where robots do much or most of our menial
labour, and continue to do so, but we have not been freed from having to
continue labouring at other things.
* This is because we don't collectively *own* the robots and their
labour, so instead of benefitting from their work like in the sci-fi
movies or the Jetsons, we have to find jobs the robots haven't replaced yet.
* The people benefitting from the robots are, as usual, the wealthy
people who could afford to buy the robots in the first place to replace
the workers.
* Rather than have a big robot-ownership marxist revolution to balance
the scales, suitable taxation of the wealthy, whether due to their vast
power to influence global finance or simply their ownership of all the
job-stealing robots, could provide virtual collective-robot-ownership,
and help create a world where we all benefit from automation.

In the context of international development, it will be interesting to
see if any countries follow a different path to us, and focus on humans
over robots. Not by excluding robots, because that's wasteful of a
powerful technology, but by preventing robots from becoming agents of
unchecked capitalism and destroying domestic labour markets without
providing recompense to the displaced workers.

It's commonly held that Ludd (from whose name we derive "Luddite") was
against mechanisation and technology. In fact, he was against the
centralised ownership of mechanisation by factory owners, which turned
the weaving industry from a worker-owned cottage industry into a
factory-centric capitalist industry, making weavers into wage-slaves.
Robots are just the same; who's going to be the "robot luddite" of 211X?