I foresaw a future that allowed every citizen one robot that he could lease out to factories or other service providers who would not be able to own their own robots. ie. one person, one robot. The income from the lease would be enough to provide a good living for each person.
The result of this may be that families have more children ( which supply more robots that could be used as family robots) which result in higher productivity and a comfortable existence for all involved.
Jevons's early book The Coal Question forecast the exhaustion of all of Great Britain's coal reserves and the end of its industrial economy. He actually mentioned solar power, but thought that while it could work in the American southwest it would never do for the British Isles to rely on it.
My favorite prognostication about future food was a science fiction novel where the "health food" movement insisted on eating only food digested by bacteria and fungi, on the ground that natural plant tissues were full of naturally evolved toxins. I forget which novelist wrote that. Maybe Stephenson?
I have been haunted for the past year or two by the vision of a future that looks back in horror on the reckless use of synthetic pharmaceuticals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and makes almost no use of things from oral contraceptives to psychological medications to RNA vaccines, regarding such things the way we regard Victorian use of tartar emetic and calomel and the like.
Reminds me of trope of scifis still have drug laws/cops etc "Outlander" "Minority Report" first come to mind. They can imagine any future except the end of prohibition.
Interesting example; I haven't thought about that before! Do you know of any sci-fi that pointedly doesn't have drug laws, aside from the ones intentionally written to exemplify libertarianism?
Historically speaking, prohibition does seem to be rare, but I think the modern era has made it more possible to enforce than before?
I foresaw a future that allowed every citizen one robot that he could lease out to factories or other service providers who would not be able to own their own robots. ie. one person, one robot. The income from the lease would be enough to provide a good living for each person.
The result of this may be that families have more children ( which supply more robots that could be used as family robots) which result in higher productivity and a comfortable existence for all involved.
Sometimes it is nice to dream…..
Jevons's early book The Coal Question forecast the exhaustion of all of Great Britain's coal reserves and the end of its industrial economy. He actually mentioned solar power, but thought that while it could work in the American southwest it would never do for the British Isles to rely on it.
My favorite prognostication about future food was a science fiction novel where the "health food" movement insisted on eating only food digested by bacteria and fungi, on the ground that natural plant tissues were full of naturally evolved toxins. I forget which novelist wrote that. Maybe Stephenson?
I have been haunted for the past year or two by the vision of a future that looks back in horror on the reckless use of synthetic pharmaceuticals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and makes almost no use of things from oral contraceptives to psychological medications to RNA vaccines, regarding such things the way we regard Victorian use of tartar emetic and calomel and the like.
Reminds me of trope of scifis still have drug laws/cops etc "Outlander" "Minority Report" first come to mind. They can imagine any future except the end of prohibition.
Interesting example; I haven't thought about that before! Do you know of any sci-fi that pointedly doesn't have drug laws, aside from the ones intentionally written to exemplify libertarianism?
Historically speaking, prohibition does seem to be rare, but I think the modern era has made it more possible to enforce than before?