On The Cloud
Characters' relationships and birth dates:
Although the subjects covered are serious, I amused myself with this, with outrageous twisting of well-known plots - particularly from Shakespeare - and religious parody.
That the WWW or the 'Cloud' will become intelligent is an old idea and has been given credibility by a number of serious commentators.
The recent accusations of NSA spying on European leaders, together with the ability that already exists to stop some cars or trains or to change traffic lights, gives credibility to part of the story involving life-path manipulation. These are very early days. Who knows what might be remotely and/or computer controlled in thirty or forty years' time?
As to the economics, obviously the situation represented here is 'over the top' and a joke.
But it is increasingly true that economics is driven by consumption (and recycling) rather than production and that production is less about providing essentials (needs) than ephemeral consumer desires (wants). Fashion and celebrity are major drivers. Many goods spend a very brief time with consumers between the factory and the recycler or the tip. Few manufactured goods are beyond their useful lives when dumped, assuming that they ever had one. Likewise, the service sector is increasingly about fingernails, hair and the body beautiful. How many young people belong to a gym? How many have a tattoo? How many new sports are there?
Today if the economy if faltering, we send out a cheque in the mail, directed to the demographic with the highest proportion of non-working, non-savers.
As population declines, as it is already doing in parts of Europe, consumption will need to increase to maintain economic growth in what will increasingly be a 'two speed world economy' and this will be an interesting challenge for central banks and governments worldwide. It would be nice if this was as simple as the solution suggested by my fictional world.
After the initial publication I became interested in web-based addictions. Gambling and Porn and Dating have always driven web development. Of course, the web supports all sorts of other addictions from illicit drugs to food and excessive exercise. I've given my naughty amoral children a finger in several of those pies and attributed to them systems already evident in the Cloud.
I realise that I have laboured a couple of areas that are important to the 'meaning of life debate'. I'm not sufficiently skilled at fiction to work them into a story as sub-text yet. Still learning.
But I'm constantly surprised by people who think they could still have been 'here' if their parents' lives had been one second different. For example, no Jew less than seventy years old could be here if it were not for the Holocaust; nor Aborigine alive but for Cook. Why is this not obvious?
The lottery of conception is easy to show but every day is a lottery. Have you ever been in a car accident or had a fall? For those of us who had parents and grandparents who fought or were bombed and were injured, or not, a second is much longer than the difference between being shot and killed, just wounded, or not.
In the shorter term, the current debate over anthropogenic CO2 is like complaining of a headache when dying of cancer. The headache is relatively easy to fix with an aspirin (a mix of renewables and nuclear energy - see elsewhere on this website), the cancer, of over-fecund humanity, is not.
The real problem is easier to see than an elephant in the room: click here
On current trends, within sixty years India will have half a billion people more than China and Africa will have a billion more mouths to feed. If billions more innocent children are not to die unpleasantly this century it is important for the world that high growth countries emulate China and implement negative population growth, if necessary, a 'Two (children) is enough' policy like Singapore. And if they must, so must we.
RM