I was listening to something the other day and the guy talking made a point about public attitudes toward homosexuals. His point was that attitudes have changed quickly. He said something along the lines that just a few years ago homosexuals were treated as bad as blacks in the south during segregation. The implication being that just last week we maintained separate accommodations for the homos. I just laughed as I am used to the Progressive Timeline.

I was not fully engaged, but my recollection is that the person talking was young-ish, maybe 30’s. For a white male born in 1985, for example, the Civil Rights Movement is as real as the French Revolution. These events are just items from his history text in high school. His teacher probably had no firsthand recollections and no one he knows has an emotional connection to it. Therefore, he has no emotional connections to it. It is just something from long ago.

Gay rights, on the other hand, are in his timeline. Picking a side and defending it was a big part of how young white males defined themselves in the 2000’s. The fact that his parents most certainly laughed at comics like Paul Lynde or watched Liberace perform on TV is unknown to him. He does not even think about the implications of his belief that a generation ago homosexuals were kept on lavender plantations. That would mean his parents were monsters by today’s enlightened standards.

He does not think of those things and it is not unique. Steve Sailer likes to point out that people have trouble keeping relative numbers in their head, like the actual number of homosexuals they see in their day. I would point out that people struggle understanding time, beyond the present day. There is now, the past you experienced and the way way back, like when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. It is why people struggle to accept evolution. It takes too long.

When I was a boy, my grandfather would talk to me about Russia, the Bolsheviks and the Cold War. Having escaped the Bolsheviks, he had a keen interest in them and wanted me to know what he knew about communism. I will never forget one conversation I had with him when he said the Cold War is forever and there was no winning. The best we could do is keep them from conquering the world.

I was a kid, but the idea of anything lasting forever sounded a bit dodgy. More important, a society run by blood thirty fanatics trying to impose an illogical social order would run afoul of reality eventually. I was young so I could not see things through the eyes of my grandfather, but it always stuck with me. I thought of that day while watching the Berlin Wall topple over as Europe celebrated the end of the Cold War.

My grandfather’s tales are real to me. His father’s tales are unknown to me because I never knew him. I never heard him tell those stories. The result is my historical framework starts around the Great War. My sense of the past starts at that point and becomes increasingly clear and intense as we move closer to my age. I feel like I know the Reagan years completely, even though I have probably forgotten most of it, but I lived through it so it looms large in my mind.

This is why Hitler remains a specter that haunts the imaginations of the people of today. The average age of Americans is thirty-seven so that means most people know someone who knew someone that experienced Hitler. If you are thirty-seven your parents are probably in their 60’s and their parents, your grandparents, lived through Hitler. In 20 years, the number of people who knew someone who knew Hitler will be much smaller. In another generation, it will be no one and Hitler will be just another face in the history text.

The other side of this is how the Cult of Modern Liberalism shuffles the past so easily to fit their current agenda. Utopian cults are obsessed with the future as it is the locus of their belief system. The promise land is just over the horizon so all effort must be made for the final push to reach it. This obsession with the future not only prevents seeing the world as it is but forces the believer to rearrange the past to fit the narrative. This is easily done when the past feels like a foreign country.

At the dawn of this current period in the West, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This was from his book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Looking back at this, it seems laughable, but smart people really thought the long twilight struggle was over and the folks from the Mayflower had finally won. After all, their entire intellectual life was organized around the struggle for liberal democracy against the great enemy of totalitarianism. In fact, it was this struggle that defined western liberal intellectual life. Once the struggle was over, then it only made sense that history was now over.

This historical amnesia is a not permanent feature of man. Bronze Age people knew they were an old people. So much so, in fact, many Bronze Age rulers would commission research on how their ancestors dressed and decorated their palaces. The idea was to not forget the past. Egyptian rulers dressed the same way for 1500 years for a reason. The past was what you were so to forget it was to die, in a way, by killing those who came before you and made you.

We are in a strange age in that respect. Mass media has some role in it. Huge news today is forgotten tomorrow, because we are buffeted on all sides from media bullhorns demanding our immediate attention. It is not that people can no longer remember the past; it is that they do not have time to remember it. Instead of fitting the present into the timeline, it is tossed over our shoulder so we can rush off to the next thing.

Where this all leads is hard to know. There’s some data to suggest we have become increasingly dumber since the 1800’s. This could simply be demographics. In 1800 the population of England was roughly ten million, while all of Africa was ninety million. Britain now has sixty-five million people while Africa 1.2 billion. The population of the lowest IQ population has grown at twice the rate of one of the brightest. This trend is accelerating so the average IQ will drop with it.

But the mass culture has something to with it too. There is really no reason to remember a lot of things when they are easily looked up on-line or off your phone. Being smart today is about knowing where the information is located or how it is associated with other known information. Remembering stuff is just not very useful. History, after all, is just formal remembering so it makes sense that history is dying as any sort of remembering is giving way to technology.

Then there is the fact we are on the verge of a great automation of work that will make remembering the past even more pointless as the life of man becomes pointless. Children have no reason to dwell on the past or think of the future. Instead, they enjoy the day playing with their toys. Perhaps the growing amnesia in the West is just part of the slow infantilization of man. One day people will loom at their surroundings and wonder how they got there and who made them. Perhaps even imagine the machines were made by gods.

The very, very abbreviated version of the Marxist concept of creative annihilation is that capitalism not only destroys previous economic orders to make way for the new, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth. The manufacturer that implements automation destroys the value of plants that lack automation. When the fully automated plant comes online, the semi-automated plant loses it’s value.

For Marx and those who followed him, this seemed rather obvious. Acme Widget pops up to make a new gadget that eliminates the need for some old gadget. The plant making the old gadget would close and the workers would be fired. The new and better had to displace the old and that naturally meant capital always declined in value. The math would follow. At least from the perspective of a man in a rapidly industrializing world, it felt that way.

The trouble with Marxism was not so much that it had everything wrong, but that it could never square basic tenets with observable reality. The new gadget was, in fact, better than the gadget it replaced. Capitalist societies did, in fact, experience a general, as well as a specific, increase in material wealth. Clearly something else was going on which is why we have the phrase, Schumpeter’s gale.

The core of Western economic thought is that two things are essential to a thriving economic order. One is a growing population and the other is the multiplier effect from technological advance. The value created by each unit of labor, in turn makes subsequent units of labor more productive and thus more valuable. The value of the buggy whip factory may have been vaporized, but the value of the fuzzy dice factory that replaced it is much higher.

Libertarians, of course, will bore the hell out of you preaching about creative destruction. To some degree, we all accept it, even the socialists. It’s impossible not to as we have seen the process with our own eyes. The fax machine makers followed the typewriter makers into the dustbin of history, but you can now read this off your phone. Even old school socialists understand this now.

A very hard thing for people to understand is the idea that things can be true for a while and then stop being true. Alternatively, something can be true and important today, but unverifiable and insignificant tomorrow. Feudalism made a lot of sense in the 7th century, but then stopped making sense in the 14th century. By the 19th century no one really cared about it anymore. In other words, lots of things are true and important for a while, but not forever.

That’s where we may be headed with economic growth. The whole point of pushing for economic growth was to increase the general welfare. Sure, some people getting rich was nice, but that was a necessary evil. The point was to increase the overall bounty in order to make your society prosperous. Reducing scarcity has been the goal of man since the dawn of time. Even Marx accepted this as the starting point of political-economy.

We are reaching a point where vast segments of a modern economy can be turned over to robots. Japan is building indoor farms that are almost entirely automated. Automating warehousing is just about here. Driverless car technology will make driving a truck a thing of the past. Read the news and you can see the future of manual labor. It has no future. In a generation, maybe two, it will all be done by robots. More important, it will be done better, faster and cheaper.

Of course, financial transactions can be automated now, eliminating the gambling aspects of finance. It has not happened for a number of reasons, but it is coming. We talked about the law last week and how it is slowly being overrun by algos. Health care is another profession where automation will be making a huge impact over the next decades. Dr. Google is already the first consult for many people. Put in the symptoms and out pops hundreds of sites full of useful information.

Instead of the value of the widget factory being vaporized by the essential processes of capitalism, it is the value of human labor, both manual and cognitive. In fact, cognitive labor is what will most easily be replaced with automation. Instead of having the value of our labor stolen by greedy capitalist, mankind is about to have the value of its labor vaporized by our own inventions.

We are already seeing hints of the problems to come from mass automation. America has a record number of people not working. This is causing disruption in our politics and our economics. It’s hard to pitch the American Dream to people who are on an allowance from the state. More important, it is impossible for people to maintain the habits required of citizenship when they are on an allowance from the state.

The bigger challenge is how to distribute the bounty. Human societies from the dawn of agriculture have distributed wealth based on the value of labor. The great warrior who saved his people would be rewarded with lands he could pass onto his heirs. Today the smart guy who is good with the language gets rich in the law or on TV, while the smart guy with high math skills gets rich on Wall Street.

How do we distribute the bounty of society when everyone’s labor is worthless? There are a few possible answers, but none of them include maintaining cultural items like a work ethic or self-reliance. Free markets would also become an artifact for the museum. In other words, the robot future will require an entirely different culture based on the value of labor being zero. That may require a different type of human too.

I recently had the unpleasant task of working with some young attorneys on a contract. Lawyers tend to carry on like they spend their days splitting atoms, but reality is much different. They spend most of their days cutting and pasting from one document to another. Contract law is simply not that difficult, but it has been made vastly complicated by a massive bird’s nest of verbiage. Too many lawyers with too much time and too much software.

Of course, contract law should not be difficult at all. In fact, it is something that could easily be automated. After all, a contract defines a relationship. Party X agrees to do something and Party Y agrees to do something. Then there are consequences for when either party fails to do what they promised. Life is simply not that variable where there needs to be new language for each contract. There is a reason we have the expression “boiler plate” to describe contract language.

A system where the two parties could answer a series of questions about their expectations of the other in the agreement would be easy to code. Writing some code that would force compromise over contradictions would be a bit more complicated, but no more complex than answering an on-line survey. Once the parties agree, the system would get a signature from both parties and register the contract.

My bet is most people would find this much better than dealing with human lawyers, who tend to get competitive over trivialities. The machine would present both parties with the most common agreement for their situation and that would satisfy the parties in most cases. This sort of normalization would also minimize disputes as people accepted the rules, rather than look for ways around them.

Disputes would go before the machine. Rather than two lawyers trying to trick a human judge into going for their version of events, the parties would answer questions on a touch screen. If you think lie detectors work, maybe add those into the mix. Either way, the robot judge would calculate the odds of each side being truthful and then render the verdict most likely to be in the interest of justice.

Having been in court too many times, human judges always try to force a deal. It is part of their process. Imagine the parties answering the questions, given their odds of success and then offered a compromise. Since most contract cases are money cases, a haggling module would allow the parties to find a middle ground and that would be that. No deposition and interrogatories, just a couple of hours in front of iMagistrate on-line.

The beauty of the robot judge is he does not need to be in a courtroom. He could be a kiosk at the mall or an internet presence. Since the judge is automated, there would be no need for lawyers. Contract law would, for most situations, become a self-service issue, like pumping gas or washing your car. It would probably save Americans billions just in contract stuff.

Of course, there is no need to limit this approach to contracts. I am just starting there because it is fresh in my mind and one of the minor nuisances of my life. If you think it sounds preposterous, consider that you sign a contract every time you rent a car. The law regarding car rentals has become so formalized and regulated, it is just part of the background noise of vacation. Applying this to employment and services is no great leap.

Many criminal issues could also be automated as well. Drunk driving is just about to that point in America. The cop pulls you over and you are given a choice of taking a breath test or confessing. It has not put that way, but that is the reality in most states. If you refuse the breath test you lose your license until you see a judge, who always finds you guilty. Taking a breath test is just standing before the robot judge, when you think about it.

Imagine instead of arresting T’Quan and parking him in a booking cell, T’Quan is immediately brought before iMagistrate. The police enter their data and T’Quan answers a series of questions. Hard evidence like video and fingerprints are uploaded and the verdict is rendered. Maybe iMagistrate can offer the accused a plea deal. Either way, the process could take hours rather than months.

That will never happen, of course, because it is too frightening to us. Maybe not never, but no one reading this will live to see Robocop and RoboJudge, but the civil stuff is not unrealistic. There are on-line services for wills and setting up a business and even filing for divorce. Vast chunks of the law simply do not need a highly trained mouthpiece. They can be turned over to software. If software can write your will, it can sure as hell handle probate.

Got legal trouble? There is an app for that!

The other day, a woman gave me the business over my lack of enthusiasm for the new Star Wars movie. When she told me about how she was going to the first night, I said I had saw the original three, but skipped the reboot. I may have caught clips here and there, but otherwise I had no interest and I have no interest in the latest rendition. When I called it cowboys and Indians in space, I seemed to have crossed some line.

In his latest transmission, John Derbyshire takes a similar position, but for a different reason and probably a better reason than I offered. John grew up reading classic science fiction, so he knows good sci-fi and Star Wars is just crap by comparison. I agree with that, and I would add that Star Trek, the original version, is the gold standard for Hollywood science fiction.

Way back when Star Wars came out in the late 70’s, it was largely considered a kids movie. The adult sci-fi weirdos were into Star Trek, with the first convention happening in 1972. Guys spending Saturday night playing Dungeons and Dragons or learning to code on their Commodore PET were doing so wearing Spock ears, not fondling a fake light saber.

But we now live in the age of the fake nerd, and I think that’s where Star Wars fits best. The people that “fucking love science!” and watch Big Bang Theory can’t shut up about Star Wars. It’s another method to signal their membership in the cult of pseudo-scientism. They may never have made it past geometry in school, but they swear they grew up on comic books and were always a nerd.

Fake nerds are everywhere in the media these days. Jonah Goldberg is the one that always comes to mind when I think about this stuff. He has invested a lot of time casting himself as a bookish nerd-boy who grew up reading Batman comics and watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. Maybe it is true or maybe it is just clever marketing. You never can know for sure with people in the media.

In sports media, the fake nerd is everywhere because statistics are such a big part of sports. ESPN loves dressing up a millennial as a dork and having him rattle off numbers on TV. It’s often hilarious as the typical sports reporter is innumerate, barely able to count to ten without help. But they dress them up as nerds, anyway, figuring it is what the public expects.

Of course, turning science into a religion is why we have kooks like Bill Nye demanding to have skeptics thrown in prison. He’s a good reminder that you can be batshit crazy and still be able to design a decent toaster. The amusement park manager, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made it through a doctoral program, but found better money in peddling pseudo-scientific nonsense to rich people.

The funny thing about the fake nerd stuff is that real nerds are usually active people who enjoy the outdoors, playing sports and doing the sorts of things normal people do. I used to play hoops with a bunch of programmers. I know a few body builders who are engineers, one is a rocket scientist at NASA. In my experience, the highly numerate tend to be a little nuts and anything but nerdish.

Of course, the fake nerd stuff is just a pose. We live in an age of marvels where the technology is far outpacing most people’s ability to keep up. In that regard, our era has another striking resemblance to the late 19th and early 20th century, before the great wars. When Wells, Gernsbacker and Verne invented science fiction, it seemed as if science would conquer the human condition.

A century ago, to be thought of as smart you had to be a tinkerer and love what passed for science and technology at the time. Everyone was convinced that all the answers were just around the corner and the pace of technology would only accelerate. Taylorism was the economics of its day and everyone that was thought to be intelligent was into science.

A big difference between then and now is that fake nerdism is probably filling the void where religion used to reside. A century ago, even the most empirically minded went to mass, just to keep up appearances. Today, no one believes in anything, so everyone falls for everything. Slap the word “study” onto any batshit crazy idea and your fake nerd friends will be posting infographics about on their Facebook page.