Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future (4 page)

The
switchover to robots was proceeding with remarkable speed, and for
some reason it seemed like no one had really thought about the
effects of the transition. All of these people being replaced by the
robots needed some form of income to survive, but the job pool was
shrinking. The American "service economy" was what replaced
the "factory economy", and America now had about half of
its workers wrapped up in low-paying service sector jobs. These were
the jobs perfectly suited for the new robots. The question was, what
would happen to the half of the population being displaced from their
service sector jobs?

Burt
wanted to go outside and take a walk. Weather permitting, we tried to
walk every evening. We left the cafeteria and departed through the
main door along with a stream of other people.

The
building we exited was another one of the terrafoam projects.
Terrafoam was a super-low-cost building material, and all of the
welfare dorms were made out of it. They took a clay-like mud, aerated
it into a thick foam, formed it into large panels and fired it like a
brick with a mobile furnace. It was cheap and it allowed them to
erect large buildings quickly. The robots had put up the building
next to ours in a week.

The
government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on
welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead
of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare
recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in
a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing
and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to spend per
welfare recipient.

As
the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare
recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum
wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse
of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they
were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum
occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from
urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an
old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with
a bed and a TV -- the world's best pacifier. During the day the bed
was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a
sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived
they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of
people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I
arrived -- he had had a private room for several years, and my
arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it.

At
the end of the very long hallway of rooms there was the communal
bathroom. This was my least favorite part of the terrafoam
experience. The bathroom consisted of a bunch of sinks, a bunch of
shower stalls, a bunch of toilets. Given the location of our room, it
was about a 200 foot walk down to the bathroom. When you had to go at
night, it almost seemed easier to wet the bed and let the robots deal
with it in the morning. By the time you walked all the way down and
back, you were completely awake.

There
were no windows anywhere in the building. It was a cost-cutting
measure, but it also helped to make every room identical. The ceiling
height was 7 feet throughout, so it felt very small all the time. LED
lights everywhere -- our room was absolutely identical to every other
room in the building and had a single, bare LED panel bolted to the
ceiling. There was the same panel every ten feet in the hallways.
Absolutely everything in the entire building was brown. Brown walls,
brown bedspreads, brown ceilings, brown floors. Even the bathroom and
every fixture in it was completely brown.

Downstairs
there was the cafeteria staffed by robots. The robots were not bad --
the food was acceptable. They also kept the bathrooms, hallways and
rooms spotless. Every day at 7AM, 12 PM and 6 PM the breakfast, lunch
and dinner meal shifts began. There were six 15-minute shifts per
meal to save on cafeteria space. Burt and I had the third shift. You
sat down, food was served, you ate, you talked for 5 minutes while
you drank your "coffee" and you left so the next shift
could come in. With 24,000 people coming in per shift, there was no
time for standing in a cafeteria-style line. Everyone had an assigned
seat, and an army of robots served you right at your table.

Because
no one had a window, they could really pack people into these
buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print.
It was a perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube.
Each cube originally held exactly 76,800 people. Doubling this to
153,600 people in each building was unthinkable, but they were doing
it anyway. On the other hand, you had to marvel at the efficiency. At
that density, they could house every welfare recipient in the entire
country in less than 1,500 of these buildings. By spacing the
buildings 100 feet apart, they could house 200,000,000 people in a
space of less than 20 square miles if they had wanted to. At that
density, they could put everyone in the country without a job into a
space less than five miles square in size, put a fence around it and
forget about us. If they accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb or two
on us, we would all be gone and they wouldn't have to worry about us
anymore.

America
was no different from a third world nation. With the arrival of
robots, tens of millions of people lost their minimum wage jobs and
the wealth concentrated so quickly. The rich controlled America's
bureaucracy, military, businesses and natural resources, and the
unemployed masses lived in terrafoam, cut off from any opportunity to
change their situation. There was the facade of "free
elections," but only candidates supported by the rich could ever
get on the ballot. The government was completely controlled by the
rich, as were the robotic security forces, the military and the
intelligence organizations. American democracy had morphed into a
third world dictatorship ruled by the wealthy elite.

Ultimately,
you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the
people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the
century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there
were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording
nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps
on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for
terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or
a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else,
he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that
with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible.

The
only solution for most people, as they became unemployed, was
government handouts. Terrafoam housing was what the government handed
out.

My
situation was atypical really, because I was able to stay out of
Terrafoam much longer than most people. I had been lucky enough to be
a teacher, and I made the transition to administrator. That allowed
me to hang on a good long time. But as the department of education
became more and more robotic, I was squeezed out.

It
was a funny experience. Manna informed me on Friday afternoon that I
was to be fired. But the Manna network also knew that my bank account
was close to zero and there was no way I would be able to make the
next rent payment. The Manna network also knew that there were no job
prospects for me, since it knew the employment status of everyone.
Like most people, nearly everything I owned was leased. I wouldn't be
able to make the payments on any of that either. I was unmarried and
all of my relatives were in Terrafoam already. Manna knew that. No
one I knew in the city had offered to take me on as a guest, so that
was out and Manna knew it.

So
Manna put it all together and took the liberty to unplug me. As I
finished the dismissal interview and left the building, I had two
robotic escorts. The robot on my right addressed me as a robotic bus
pulled up. The bus looked to be about half full.

"Jacob
Lewis105, you are now unemployed. Do you have other means of
employment?"

Of
course it knew the answer, but this formality could not be avoided.
"No."

"Do
you have guest status with any resident?" The robot asked.

"No."

"Do
you have means of support unknown to me?"

I
suppose I could have stashed a cache of gold under my mattress, and
this question allowed me to declare it. Such a cache would, of
course, be grounds for arrest, so I was screwed either way. "No."
I was without any means of support.

"In
accordance with ordinance 605.12b, you have been assigned room 140352
in building 16, resident quant C. This assignment provides you with
suitable housing and nourishment to sustain your life. Please board
the bus."

That
was how you ended up in Terrafoam. The system knew you had no means
of support, so it "gave" you one. You could leave terrafoam
once you regained a means of support, but there really was no way to
do that unless Manna gave it to you.

Was
it prison? Yes. But there were no walls. The food was good. The
robots were as nice and respectful as they could be. You could walk
outside wherever and whenever you wanted to. But there was an
invisible edge. When you walked too far away from your building and
approached that edge, two robots would approach you. I had tried it
many times.

"Time
to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone
and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There
were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around.
Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train
derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on.
They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of
their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any
move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were
immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried
it twice.

It
was a nice day. The sun was shining and the temperature was mild, so
a lot of people were out milling around. Burt and I had decided to
walk down along the river as far as the robots would let us. I was
wearing the same coverall everyone else was, and I unbuttoned the top
two buttons because the sun made it warm.

"Today's
your one year anniversary in terrafoam. How's it feel?" Burt
asked.

"I'm
thinking that there has to be a way out of here." I said.

"I
know what you are saying. I try not to think about it. But it's not
that unusual. Over the course of history, billions of people have
lived this way. Think back to when you were living in suburbia. Your
parents had a 3,000 square foot house and the pool at the turn of the
century. You were living it up. Unfortunately, at that moment in
history, there were billions of people around the world living in
poverty -- they were living off a dollar or two per day. Meanwhile,
your family had 300 dollars a day. Did you do anything about it?
Billions and Billions of people living in third-world countries,
squatting together in the dirt, crapping in ditches. They would walk
down by the river just like we are doing right now and say to each
other, 'There must be a way out.' They could see that they were lost
-- totally wasted human potential trapped in a terrible situation.
Their kids and their kids' kids forever would live like this because
there was absolutely no way out. Did anyone stop to help them? Did
you stop to help them? No. You were too busy splashing in the pool.
Those billions of people lived and died in incredible poverty and no
one cared."

Burt
could really get on your nerves like that. This was not the first
time I had heard this soliloquy. It was depressing, and true, but
after the third or fourth time it got old. Of course, he had been in
terrafoam a lot longer than I had. I guess he'd had a lot more time
to stew about it.

And
he was right. No one helped the billions of people living in poverty
at the turn of the century. And no one would help us now. The world
simply did not work that way. If you are living a comfortable life in
a comfortable neighborhood with a swimming pool in the backyard, what
do you care about anyone else? You are immune to their problems, so
you keep on splashing and swimming. It never occurs to you to help
them, because it is so abstract.

"There
has to be a way out of here," I repeated.

"Are
you insane? You can't redesign society. No one can." Burt
laughed out loud as he said it. "Let's see, if I'm a rich person
living in a gorgeous, walled city in incredible luxury, let's see,
would I want to change things???? Hmmm. Hmmmm. This is a tough
question. That's why you are insane. You are never going to change
anything. We will live and die here. The rich have no need for us
anymore, and they certainly are not going to spread their wealth
around to us. Hell, why didn't you give your swimming pool up at the
turn of the century to help the people starving and dying in Africa?
Or even other Americans living in poverty?" Burt was enjoying
his cynicism.

"It
wouldn't have helped anything. One swimming pool would not have
helped anyone in Africa. That was the problem -- even if you, as a
person, wanted to help, there was no way to help. That's why we need
to redesign society. Society should not allow one little group of
people to live like royalty while 80% of the people on the planet are
starving to death or living on welfare. Why would we create a society
like that? What good is it to have people with billions of dollars,
while the majority of people starve?" I asked.

"Society
has always been like that. You lived like that when you were a kid.
Did you care?" Burt asked back.