Editorial

The Revolutionaries

Harvard Square is one of the great crossroads of the Western World, an incongruous conglomeration of buildings old and new, construction workers and students, learned professors and unwashed hippies, milling through an impossible traffic crunch of autos, buses, trackless trolleys and bikes.

Not long ago, somebody pushed a pamphlet into my hand as I was walking through the Square, and intoned, "All power to the people."

Without even thinking about it, I muttered back, "Nobody can be trusted with all the power."

He was staggered. We went into an interesting, but not always rational, discussion of American political traditions, there on the street corner in front of the Cambridge Trust Company's main office. We attracted something of a crowd—mostly young, about equal numbers of black and white. They made it clear that most of them considered themselves to be revolutionaries, of one sort or another.

It also became clear that none of them had a firm understanding of what a revolution is.

The American Revolution wasn't in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. It didn't really begin until after the fighting had stopped. The real Revolution happened in 1789, with the framing of the Constitution.

A revolution is not merely the overthrow of the existing establishment. That may be a necessary ingredient, but it's not sufficient to create a revolution. A revolution is the creation of a new order, a new establishment. There have been plenty of coups d'etat and bloody insurrections throughout history, but precious few true revolutions. The nations of Latin America seem to go through a new uprising with every phase of the moon, yet there have been few revolutions there: only the exchange of one dictator for another.

Political revolutions are very rare. And we might make the case that they happen only after revolutions of thought have paved the way for revolutionary changes in government.

The French Enlightenment fathered the American Revolution, for example. And behind the thinking of. Rousseau, Voltaire and the other philosophers of the Enlightenment, was an even deeper revolution that ultimately changed the entire world: the sweeping new concepts of the universe and man's place in it, as formulated by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and the other scientists of the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries.

Science and its offspring, technology, are not the only revolutionary forces in our world. But they are an important—perhaps decisive—factor in changing our attitudes, our social customs, our economics, and our politics.

The former director of the National Bureau of Standards, Lewis M. Branscomb, put it nicely:

"Technology has brought us changes, most of which we should welcome, rather than reject. Wealth is the least important of these changes. Of greater importance is change itself. Those young humanists who think themselves revolutionaries are nothing compared to technology."

Ancient Athens was a proud democracy—for a small number of its citizens, the free-born males. When asked how he could be so proud of his city when more than half its population were slaves, an Athenian replied, "When the looms spin by themselves, we'll have no need for slaves."

It took more than two thousand years, but science and technology finally eliminated slavery. Not the politicians, not the religious leaders, not the philosophers and abolitionists. Technology did it. When steam power became cheaper than human muscle power, slavery collapsed.

When the Industrial Revolution came on the scene, in the early Nineteenth Century, the most horrified people were the former slaves themselves. While a new and growing class of capitalists was busily amassing fortunes (and often losing them with equal speed), the former slaves and workers resisted the technology that was turning their safe, old, well-known world into something new and scary. These workers were being wrenched out of their centuries-old traditions and being thrown off the farms and out of the villages, to starve or—maybe worse—move into the ugly, dirty, dangerous cities and go to work in the factories.

Some workers rebelled. They smashed the newfangled machines and insisted on keeping the old ways. By 1815 the movement had acquired a name: Luddite. Ned Lud has the distinction of being the first man in recorded history to attack a machine. Historians generally add that he was a half-wit. As a counterrevolutionary force, the Luddites had about as much chance to reverse the Industrial Revolution as the Scarlet Pimpernel had of stopping the French Revolution. And the "good old days" that the Luddites wanted to return to consisted of dawn-to-dusk back-breaking labor, for pennies! But those early factories were even worse, as anyone who's read Dickens can understand. As the new industrialism flowered sootily in Europe and America, men such as Karl Marx decided that it would take bloody revolution to achieve changes such as a ten-hour workday and retirement benefits. Marx and the other reformers failed to understand the real revolutionary force of technology, which eventually produced enough wealth so that today's workers have more luxuries than most of the world's emperors have ever known. Of course, it took action and pressure by the workers to get their share of the wealth. But if the wealth wasn't there in the first place, nobody would get to share it. Technology produced the wealth.

Technology helped the workers to be more productive, which created more real wealth, and eventually eased the workers' lives. Today, it's clear that the life style of a nation's workers depends on its technology, not its ideology. Technology-poor communist nations are no more a workers' paradise than technology-poor capitalist nations. And vice versa.

Today a Second Industrial Revolution is in full swing. Thanks to some imaginative tinkering by Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Charles Babbage, and a host of other scientists and engineers, we have electronic computers that are getting smaller and smaller, smarter and smarter, and cheaper and cheaper. Desktop computers are here now. Pocket-sized computers are on the, way.

As the First Industrial Revolution freed man from physical slavery, the Second Industrial Revolution will free him from mental drudgery. It's silly, uneconomic and immoral to make a man dig a ditch with a pickax and shovel when the same man—with a bit of training—can operate a backhoe and get the job done in minutes, rather than hours. His productivity zooms up, the cost of ditch-digging goes down, and his back doesn't ache so much when the day's work is done. Similarly, it's ridiculous for a man to stand on an assembly line eight hours a day turning a few screws as widget after widget passes by, when a computer-directed robot can do the job more accurately, more cheaply, and without complaining about the hours, the pay, the fringe benefits, the foreman, the shop steward, et cetera.

The assembly-line worker is metamorphosing into the one-man factory manager, just as the plowman evolved into the tractor-driving farm owner. Automated factories are here now. Robots are working on the assembly lines of Ford and General Motors. The next U.A.W. negotiations will include arguments about them.

Of course many people are frightened by the prospect of being replaced by automation. And for good reason. If a man's going to lose his job, platitudes about the march of technology aren't going to soothe him. Or his union.

One of the major social questions of the coming decade will involve automation. Most of the jobs in today's marketplace will disappear, ultimately, just as we have scant need for saddle makers and quill sharpeners anymore. New types of jobs will come into being, and there's going to be an enormous increase in demand for service-type jobs; personal relations will become increasingly important in a society where most of the hard goods are made—and designed—by machines. But the displacement effect of automation is only beginning to be felt. An unemployed welder won't necessarily he retrainable into a social worker.

The long-term effect of the Second Industrial Revolution will be to enormously increase the amount of real wealth in the world, just as the effect of the First Industrial Revolution was. The children of tomorrow's displaced workers could—if we work things right—be employed at jobs that are more human, more creative, more personal (and require shorter hours) than anything their parents dreamed of. Just as we no longer have slaves to do our toting and hauling, we'll no longer need to have huge numbers of people working at repetitive, boring, brain-shriveling jobs.

A new economic setup will result when the full impact of the Second Industrial Revolution hits. And a new social order will arise too, just as it arose out of the First Industrial Revolution. Thus, a revolution in the research laboratories of the mid-Nineteenth Century is spreading through industry today, and will affect social and political revolutions around the world by the early Twenty-first Century.

There will be—there are now!—a new breed of Luddites who'll fight the Second Industrial Revolution as hard, and as unsuccessfully, as the original Ned Lud and his bully boys did. The disappointing fact is that a fair share of the new Luddites come from the science fiction community; they should know better.

There's even a Third Industrial Revolution that's just beginning, in which a large part of Earth's industrial plant will move off this planet. G. Harry Stine will have more to say on that subject in the near future.

Beyond that, however, there's a much more complex and far-reaching revolution shaping up. Its components come from such varied scientific disciplines as plasma physics, genetic biology, and behaviorist psychology. Its effects—well, it will affect everyone on Earth, and transform society completely. But for better or worse?

From the plasma physics labs, within the next ten years or perhaps sooner, will come news that a sustained thermonuclear fusion reaction has been achieved. By the end of this century, practical fusion power plants can be a reality.

The history of humankind, from Olduvai Gorge to sprawling megalopolises, can be viewed as a succession of finding and using constantly better energy sources. Muscle power, wood fires, coal, coke, petroleum, nuclear fission—all produced more energy, allowed man to expand his habitat, his ecological niche. Now we've reached out into space, down to the bottom of the sea, and covered the globe with our civilization. And we've fouled our planet with the waste products.

Fusion marks the turning point.

The fuel for fusion is deuterium, which comes from the sea. For every six thousand atoms of ordinary hydrogen in the oceans, there's an atom of deuterium. And the fusion process is energetic enough so that a cubic meter of sea water (about two hundred and twenty-five gallons) can yield four hundred thousand kilowatt-hours of energy. One cubic kilometer of sea water, then, has the same energy content as all the known oil reserves in the world. And that's using only one-sixth of the hydrogen in the water!

This means that fusion power can be cheap and abundant. There will eventually be no need for fossil fuels or fissionables. Which in turn means there'll be no need to gut this planet for coal, oil, uranium. No oil wells. No black lung disease.

The energy from fusion can also be used to recycle anything. Fusion "torches" will be the garbage disposal system par excellence. With efficient recycling, the need for fresh raw materials goes down drastically. There goes the remainder of the mining industry. And trees can be used for making oxygen, not lumber.

Fusion energy will produce abundant electricity, without pollution, and with thousands of times less radioactivity involved than that of ordinary fission power plants. With that much electricity available, there need be no such thing as a "have-not nation." Seawater can be desalted and piped a thousand kilometers inland, if necessary. The energy will be cheap enough to do it. All forms of transportation—from automobiles to starships—can use clean fusion-based electricity.

But there's more coming.

Take genetic engineering, for example. The ability to tinker with the genes of unborn children. To correct genetic faults. To erase genetic diseases such as cancer and sickle cell anemia. Or, the ability to make certain members of the population stronger, smarter, longer-lived than the rest. To make others physically strong but mentally dull, so that they make good subjects for the "superior" rulers. Genetically-enforced dictatorship can be truly self-perpetuating. Forever.

Add to this the mental manipulations of the behaviorist psychologists. Using techniques such as "positive reinforcement," psychologists such as B. F. Skinner have come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as individual freedom. Entire populations can be controlled without the people ever realizing it.

Put together the power of fusion, genetic engineering, and behaviorist control, and you have a lovely world—or an unbreakable tyranny.

That's the revolution that's lurking at the end of the century, waiting for us. We can use these revolutionary forces to transform the world—in fact, they will transform the world. But in which direction? Toward greater individual freedom and responsibility? Or toward dictatorship?

These are problems that science fiction should and must examine. How can we handle such forces without falling into the trap of dictatorship? What new institutions and new social structures must be built to safeguard humankind?

For the real revolutionaries are those who know how to build, not just tear down. Whether they build for us all or just for themselves depends on many factors. But if "power to the people" is the motto, then it has to be the power of knowledge and understanding.

THE EDITOR