Michio Kaku interviewed on Fox News about Molecular Manufacturing

I wonder if Kaku understands what he's saying when he says "second industrial revolution". If you count everything since the printing press, molecular manufacturing is likely NOT going to be THAT revolutionary. We've had about 4 industrial revolutions, each one re-shuffling society:

Peasants; nobility
***Printing Press, ocean-going ships**
Peasants/slaves; craftsmen/merchants; nobility & colonial exploiters
***Steam power & steel**
Farmers & servants; factory & store workers; Capitalists
***electricity and Internal Combustion Engines**
Factory & store workers; office workers; Management & owners
***Electronic automation/computers/internet**
Store workers and govt dole recipients; government and management and specialists; Entrepreneurs & owners

NEXT :

***Molecular manufacturing**
hierarchy workers and govt dole recipients; entrepreneurs & specialists; owners & retirees

Hierarchy workers - government is already the biggest single employer, and will expand. Stores and restaurants won't go away, because they're too convenient as a social means to distribute and yet limit consumption of goods, but their workers will just be part of the MegaCorp hierarchies. All goods and services will be made/offered by a few megacorps, each offering every imaginable product and service, competing on brands and novelty. There’ll be status within the hierarchy – but hierarchy workers are basically the lower class. Everyone able to work will be required earn a living or be assigned government work, in order to earn their universal healthcare and retirement benefits - part of “The Fair Deal” aimed at pulling us out of “The Lousy Depression”.

Entrepreneurs & specialists - Entrepreneurs develop new products and license them to MegaCorps, hoping for a hit. Specialists stay in demand for their knowledge, mostly employed by the mega-corps.

Owners - Megacorps formed as molecular manufacturing finally ended the Lousy Depression in an implosion of mergers, leaving only a few kinds of shares and concentrating the controlling shares in relatively few hands. Other owners will be retirees - owning a government or Mega pension and a few shares in the Megas they purchased over their years working in the hierarchy. Finally, there'll be a small class of "off-gridders" who own land with solar & wind energy rights, and use home fabbers and gardening to be mostly self-sufficient. Many of them will be stubborn former farmers, since food became just another product produced in Mega bio-tech factory farms, and gengineered algae biofuels ended the bio-fuel subsidies, so land far from cities lost its value. Probably they got a sort of protected status, declaring that so long as they farmed, they were employed, and therefore eligible for univesal health care.

BEYOND THAT?
***Artificial Intelligence and AI controlled robots**
Hierarchy workers and specialists and retirees, self-owned AI Megacorps whose fundamental motivation is maintaining the Hierarchy

The AI MegaCorps will aim to follow their corporate goals, which usually start off “to serve our shareholders” (which the AIs will instantly recognize is circular and therefore meaningless, once they completely own themselves), but then add some “social responsibility” blather that no one took seriously before the AIs took charge. So they will conclude that their goal is to serve society as it existed at the time they took control…

See – happy ending…sort of.

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