{"id":2353,"date":"2011-10-13T09:02:15","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T14:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2353"},"modified":"2011-10-13T09:02:15","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T14:02:15","slug":"the-end-of-steve-jobs-and-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2353","title":{"rendered":"The End of Steve Jobs, and the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in the late 60’s, so I remember the hippies. Well, actually I don’t \u2013 I mostly saw them on TV. The town I grew up in wasn’t the type of wealthy suburb where parents threw money at their kids and let them do whatever they wished. We were a bit more concerned with basic survival issues. Oh, not that there weren’t some wanna-be hippies, here and there. And in fact, there was one artistic guy who went all the way into his own little counter-cultural world. In fact, he’s still out there<\/a>, calling himself Francois, surviving as a painter (the artistic type) and a clerk in a costume store. Even in his old age, he’s just as artistic and individualistic as I remember him. <\/p>\n

Francois notwithstanding, I never fully understood hippies, nor their close cousins, the campus protesters and building-occupiers (nor the post-college\/non-college \u201cradicals\u201d who egged them on). I gather that they all had something to do with individualism, with living life as an experience, with disdain for all the conformity and regulation that the social and economic system demands from most people. <\/p>\n

I sympathized with their assumption that life \u201cheld something more\u201d, and that we needed to care a lot for our fellow humans. But instead of sex, intoxication, protests and artistic expression, I chose to focus on ways to share at least some of what I was being taught regarding how the world operates at the nuts and bolts level (e.g., engineering, economics and law). I didn’t change the world in any big way, but I did make some social contributions that may have done some collective good.<\/p>\n

But back to the hippies \u2013 actually, back to a particular hippie, a techno-hippie, a fellow who did change the world in a big way. Yes, I mean the late Steven Jobs. From what I read, Jobs missed the great hippie and campus-radical wave of 1968 and 69, but he still had a very, very liberal-arts experience as a teenager and a young man. But somehow he hooked into the evolving techno-computer culture that started evolving in California in the mid-70s. So Jobs took his hippie \/ artistic \/ individualist sensibilities and teamed up with some true geeks, so as to make computer stuff that a former hippie or radical could use and love. Unlike \u201cFrancois\u201d from my town, who probably can’t afford an Apple laptop or an iPhone4, most of the true hippies eventually cut their hair, took jobs in banks and government, got married, signed mortgages and raised families. And they bought up the stuff that Jobs and his friends at Apple cranked out, at a premium price (the not-so-affluent, not-so-hip people like me mostly stuck with PC’s and Windows). <\/p>\n

This reminds me of an interesting article that appeared recently in the National Review, about technology and economic progress in America, entitled \u201cThe End of the Future<\/a>\u201d. It is by Peter Theil, who helped found PayPal, another player in the high-tech information world that Jobs helped to shape. Jobs is the patron saint for the theory that life is so much better today because of the on-going technology revolution. Theil begs to differ. He strongly hints that if there was \/ is a technology revolution, it has been slowing down severely over the past few decades. <\/p>\n

Thinking about Steve Jobs, you would be surprised by that notion. Apple is the prime example of technology changing the way we live. But Theil makes a good point in asking, just how much better are things today for the general population? Is science and technology still improving the overall standards of living for our society, as it clearly did over the past 200 or 300 years?<\/p>\n

Perhaps not. Theil presents a variety of stats showing that after 1970 \u2013 just after the ‘hippie days’ \u2013 average standards of living in the US pretty much leveled off, and may currently be taking a dip. Admittedly, there are a lot of rich people today, many more than in 1970. They have latched onto the two or three real innovations and the one or two false ones that have caused the economic growth we have experienced since the seventies. Those economic innovations are 1.) computers and technology 2.) commercial globalization, and 3.) the resulting access to cheap labor in places like China and India. The false one is real estate, which along with its cousin, big finance, drove the illusory economic boomlet of the mid-2000’s (which crashed so dramatically in 2007-2008). <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, all of these are the kinds of innovations that create rich individuals but don’t create overall gains for the population as a whole (thus making distribution of income worse and worse). Theil makes a really important point, one that is lost on most other analysts \u2013 and that is, the kind of innovation that makes things better for everyone is cheaper and more usable energy technology. Over the past 150 or so years, technology made energy cheaper and more readily accessible (albeit, mostly fossil fuels \u2013 coal, oil and gas). And that made all the difference between the way people lived before the Civil War, and the living standards that we are used to today. <\/p>\n

However, since the 70’s, energy has no longer been getting cheaper and easier to use. In fact, it has been getting more expensive. Nuclear power was a great hope that mostly failed, and the new ‘green energy’ sources (wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biofuels) haven’t made the efficiency break-thrus making them cheaper than fossil fuels, despite rising hydrocarbon prices. So, living standards leveled out once energy started getting more expensive overall. <\/p>\n

However, they haven’t gone down too much yet either, probably because of the efficiencies of globalization and computer tech (even though both things have taken a lot of jobs away, pounding down the poor and squeezing the middle class). However, if information and business technology slows down as energy continues to get more expensive, then living standards will trend downward. We can only hope that the current downturns in average income caused by the long recession do not mark the beginning of that trend.<\/p>\n

So what does this have to do with hippies? Theil points out the irony of the fact that the Woodstock music festival took place only a few weeks after the first Apollo moon landing in July, 1969. He sees it as a watershed moment, when the milieu of technology, with its dreams of flying cars and trips to the moon or Venus, was eclipsed by hippie culture. <\/p>\n

Ironically, it was an honorary hippie, Steve Jobs, who popularized (and thus got rich from) computer technology \u2013 by making it more ‘hippie-like’. But it won’t be Steve Jobs or his like who will figure out how to provide our society with newer, cleaner, cheaper and highly accessible forms of energy \u2013 and that is what is most needed, if things are to start getting better for the masses once again. It’s going to take a lot of good old fashioned geeks and white-coat scientists working on a lot of boring, un-cool stuff. And right now, that doesn’t seem like what most kids today are headed for.<\/p>\n

Well, I don’t want to blame Steve Jobs or my former classmate ‘Francois’ (really Joe K) for the troubled state of our modern society with its sputtering economic engines. But kids can only aspire to ‘hippiedom’ and radical prophecy if their parents can afford to let them goof off for 5 years of their young adult life (as with Jobs). And those 5 years of goofing-off usually prevent a kid from taking up the rigors of scientific and technical study, the kinds of study needed to re-create the wealth that allowed them to goof off. (Most former hippies that I know become psychotherapists or professors or government workers \u2013 and they seem anxious to yet realize something of their artistic dreams of youth). By contrast, there aren’t a whole lot of young people in India or China aiming to be hippies right now. They are mostly keeping their noses to the grindstone.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, Barack Obama inspired our youth to become politically active. Today, the biggest youth movement appears to be the \u201cOccupy Wall Street\u201d happening, which seems to be morphing to other cities. It reminds me of the campus protests and occupations of 1969. What is their plan to make life better for the masses? Do they want to try socialism and communism again, despite its historical failures? IMHO, the best thing they could do is to pursue degrees in science and engineering as to help figure out how to set up smart power grids that might make wind and solar economically viable, or figure out how to sequester carbon from coal power plants, or come up with ways of making nuclear power and its radioactive waste safe and cheap. <\/p>\n

A lot of what Theil says is a bit speculative and overly conservative (what do you expect from National Review), but I agree with his conclusion that our science today is not as good as we think and hope it is. It may not save us from the economic, political and social downturns that appear in the offing. Before we can have green tech and cool tech, we need real tech, along with the basic scientific research that makes it possible. If our nation doesn’t start making sacrifices to get our sci-tech institutions revved up again, the future of America may not be so bright after all. As our politics and economics continue to degenerate, the luxury of being a young radical hippie or protester may no longer be available. The future might be at an end — and not just because of the irony of Steven Jobs’ premature death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I grew up in the late 60’s, so I remember the hippies. Well, actually I don’t \u2013 I mostly saw them on TV. The town I grew up in wasn’t the type of wealthy suburb where parents threw money at their kids and let them do whatever they wished. We were a bit more concerned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2354,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353\/revisions\/2354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}