The passenger container down to the surface on Tahiti carried a very mixed bag: the crew going on shore leave, the passengers, and a hundred robots being transferred from Jixing Trading to the big anti-aging clinic in downtown Papeete.
ChaoLi, JieMin, David, and YongLin exited with the other passengers, the first group to exit the container. There were buses to the anti-aging clinic there for the passengers, but there was also a man there waiting with a limousine.
“Madam Chen?” he asked.
ChaoLi and YongLin both said, “Yes,” which stalled him for a moment. He carried on.
“Your party is waiting in the car.”
They looked over to the limousine, and Chen JuPing and Paul Chen-Jasic got out of the car and waved to them.
The centenarians looked to be eighty years old.
They all rushed over to the limousine, and it was a round of hugs, jumbled with greetings and surprised reactions.
“You two look amazing.”
“Yes, we feel wonderful. It’s been years – decades – since we felt so good.”
“So it really does work.”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely. And the people here are very nice.”
“And the apple pie is amazing.”
“It’s really good to see you doing so well. We were so worried about Paul.”
“Yes, I almost lost him. But they did a marvelous job.”
They all rode in the limousine to the hotel downtown, the newcomers rubber-necking out the windows.
“It looks bigger than Arcadia City.”
“Not many young people, though.”
“Yes, I understand they mostly head out to the newer cities.”
“How long is Star Dancer here?”
“About a week to unload and load, then it’s on to Earthsea.”
“So we have a week together. What fun.”
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Paul Chen-Jasic’s and Chen JuPing’s rejuvenation to the Chen-Jasic family.
With the increase in lifespans brought about by Arcadia’s more modern medicine – compared to the medicine available to the Chen clan in the Chingqing administrative region on Earth – the practice of having the family elder rule the family until his death had been modified by Chen GangHai, the eldest son of Chen LiQiang, who as Chen Zufu had brought his family to Arcadia.
Each couple serving as Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu had since administered the family for twenty years or so. That was about the time it had been with shorter lifespans, but it now meant there was a significant period of retirement after stepping down.
Then again, the Chen-Jasic family on Arcadia was a huge operation compared to the size of extended families in rural China. Whereas the Chen family was thirty-one individuals in the load of colonists that had come to Arcadia, the Chen-Jasic extended family was now hundreds of thousands of people, all pulling for the common goals of the clan.
The common goals set by Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu.
Two decades of such huge responsibility were enough.
Now, with the availability of the anti-aging treatments on Tahiti, that retirement period would be greatly extended. There would be more than one retired couple who had experience running the clan for the current Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu to consult with.
For when you were the unchallenged head of such an operation, who could you talk to for advice, to express your concerns, to air out your worries? Why, someone who had done it already, of course.
The anti-aging treatments of Tahiti would thus give the Chen-Jasic family leaders a greater depth of advice going forward.
David Bolton and Chen YongLin would have Chen MinChao, Jessica Chen-Jasic, Paul Chen-Jasic, and Chen JuPing as their advisers, with an experience base that ran back over eighty years, back to the founding of the Republic, all the way back to the Kendall regime.
When Chen JieMin and Chen ChaoLi became Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu, in about twenty years, they would have six former leaders of the clan as their advisers and confidants.
After their own retirement, JieMin and ChaoLi would likely serve as advisers to the heads of clan for eighty years before they finally passed.
During the day, the six Arcadians did some sightseeing on Tahiti. It was a beautiful planet, by chance reminiscent of its namesake, and they took in the sights whenever the newcomers weren’t at the anti-aging clinic for preliminary evaluation. In the evenings, they took dinner together in a private dining room so they could speak openly.
On their second night on Tahiti, ChaoLi put the question to JieMin.
“JieMin, where are you at in your evaluation of the impacts of all this trade and interconnection to the colonies?”
“That’s a very long and deep topic, ChaoLi.”
“Nevertheless, you’re never going to have a more concerned or experienced audience for it.”
“Yes, JieMin,” JuPing said. “You’d best use us while we’re all together.”
“Very well,” JieMin said, then paused to gather his thoughts.
“The most concerning technologies among the colonies we are in contact with so far are the robots and the anti-aging therapeutics. Each has the potential for causing a demographic crisis on the short term, although both are hugely beneficial on the medium to long term.
“The robots are the easier to understand. They don’t just replace one worker, they replace about six workers per robot.”
“So many?” YongLin asked.
“Yes. They work all day, all around the clock, seven days a week. That’s at least four workers right there. But their economies of movement and speed of work make it more like six to one. ChaoLi and I saw them working on the interior of Star Dancer, and also watched a video of their work on the interstellar freight station in orbit around Arcadia.
“It was eye-opening. They do not stop to think about the task, or plan the next piece. They do that on the fly. They are coordinating with each other constantly over radio. We saw dozens of robots simply launching themselves across space, without ever running into each other. They all knew the vector the others were on, and avoided each other, sometimes by mere feet.
“In practical terms, it means that anything the robots can do no longer makes any sense to have a person do.”
“That’s a huge disruption,” David said.
“Absolutely. Now, since the robots create more– well, more of everything, really – and don’t consume anything but electricity, which we have an abundance of, standards of living go up, and by a lot. Food becomes cheaper. Housing becomes cheaper. Everything becomes cheaper, really.”
“Yes,” Paul said. “Absent scarcity, what you are really paying for when you buy something is the time of the person that made it.”
“Absolutely. And with the robots being the next thing to free, everything becomes very cheap. But without employment, no one has even the money it takes to buy it cheap.
“Do we give away food and housing? We almost could. What of us then? How do we fare psychologically when we have no value? The history there is not hopeful.
“The longevity change with the anti-aging therapeutics has very nearly the same impact.
“On Arcadia, people start working very young, but many of the colonies reverted to the Earth model. People start working when they have learned their occupation, between perhaps eighteen and twenty-five years old. They retire generally in their sixties and live well into their nineties.
“So perhaps forty or fifty years in the workforce, and thirty years in retirement.
“But if people live until a hundred and seventy-five, what then? The same ratio of work years to retirement years means working until a hundred and ten or twenty, with a retirement lasting fifty or sixty years.
“That’s unlikely. So what you end up with is a huge demographic overhang, where most of the population is retired. A minority of people work for a living.
“That’s another huge disruption,” David said.
“Yes, but the two actually compensate each other to a certain extent.”
“How’s that, JieMin?” JuPing asked.
“Consider someone who is out of work at fifty because robots have taken his job. It might take him five years to learn a new skill, a technical one that the robots can’t do. He’s fifty-five when he’s ready to work again, only ten years short of retirement.
“But if anti-aging treatments have reduced his physical age to just below fifty, and he has a life expectancy now of another hundred years, it makes sense to pursue that new occupation. He might work in that field for twenty-five or thirty years, retiring at a physical age of sixty-five, and still have sixty or seventy years of retirement.
“That huge demographic overhang from the anti-aging therapeutics doesn’t matter, either. If the necessities of life – food, housing, most material goods – become cheap, and are mostly provided by robots, you have the base of workers you need to support that overhang. But now they’re robots.
“Overall, the total gross product of the colonies increases by several times, very rapidly, due to the robots. Yet consumption less than doubles due to the anti-aging therapeutics. Standards of living – on average – will skyrocket.”
“That’s the key phrase, though, JieMin,” Paul said. “On average.”
“Yes, Paul. Exactly. The question we face is how we keep individual people from getting caught in the gears in the short term. The guy who’s displaced by a robot, does not yet have the anti-aging therapeutics, now has no income, and still has a family to raise.
“But over the long haul, once things settle out, I think everyone is better off. Much better off, actually.”
“That’s a pretty puzzle you’ve presented us with, JieMin,” David said.
“Yes, but who else better to solve it than us?” Paul asked. “And if we can’t solve it, I think we’re in for deep trouble.”
“We should probably get MinChao and Jessica in this discussion, too,” JuPing said. “It’s too late on Arcadia at the moment, but we could have a meeting tomorrow.”
“I recorded JieMin’s talk,” ChaoLi said. “I’ll send it to them, so they can be up to speed with the rest of us.”
“Send that to me, as well, ChaoLi,” YongLin said. “I’d like to listen to it again.”
“I’ll send it to everybody, and I’ll see if Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu come back with a time for a meeting.”
It was mid-morning the next day in Arcadia City – and still dark in Papeete – when Jessica and MinChao compared notes on JieMin’s talk.
“So what do you think?” Jessica asked.
“I think JieMin has his finger on the problems,” MinChao said. “It’s interesting that they tend to compensate for each other, in a way.”
“Yes. I wonder if there isn’t some way to magnify that. To make the compensations greater, so there’s a path through the short term for people who would otherwise be, in JieMin’s language, ‘caught in the gears.’”
“How would you do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jessica said. “Just throwing things out, what if some percentage of the robots built block housing for people going to university beyond age twenty, say. And those blocks could have free meals for everyone living there. So a displaced worker and his family would be taken care of while he learned a new trade. Something the robots can’t do.”
“Would you do that as a government program of some sort?”
“Oh, heavens, no. You want something that would work.”
MinChao chuckled.
“Then how?”
“I don’t know. That all might be rather inexpensive to provide. The robots could build it, and the robots could grow and prepare the food. The university could probably do it on its own. Provide it to the students. Maybe with a bit of help.”
MinChao nodded. The Chen-Jasic family were big financial supporters of the university. When you gave money to an institution like that, you had a certain amount of control over how it was spent. Especially if it was an ongoing commitment.
“That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “You still have the problem of the anti-aging therapeutics, though. Someone going to school for a new career needs time.”
“Yes. Perhaps that could be part of it, too. I wonder how much the anti-aging treatments would cost if they were provided through local clinics rather than ship people off to Tahiti.”
“Well, clearly we need to do something.”
“Yes,” Jessica said. “A substantial number of disaffected and unemployed people is destabilizing. They might tear everything down, if the system was failing them. Justly so, I might add.”
“We need to size the problem. What jobs can robots do and not do? How many people are in one kind of job versus the other?”
“The first question is easy to answer”.
“It is?” MinChao asked.
“Certainly. Just ask them.”
They all met in a video call. The current Chen, MinChao and Jessica, were in her tea room, in late afternoon, with the giant display wall showing a private meeting room in the hotel in Papeete. On the Tahiti side, the six Arcadians – they who had been or would be Chen – sat around one side of a round table, facing the meeting room’s large display. In Papeete, it was mid-morning of the day after JieMin’s talk.
“Have you two had a chance to see JieMin’s presentation, MinChao?” JuPing asked.
“Yes, and Jessica had some thoughts about it,” MinChao said, and nodded to his wife.
Jessica told them her thoughts from the morning, then continued.
“So I called Loukas’s robot this morning – Bob, his name is – and I asked him. He said that, generally speaking, robots are good at doing known things. Like hanging drywall and finishing out Star Dancer. Or working from plans to build a house or building.
“What they are not good at is deciding that Star Dancer needed finishing out, or coming up with the plans for the house.
“He actually took a list of occupations, and separated them into three categories for me. Ones they could do, ones they could not do, and others that were part of one and part of the other.”
Jessica mailed the list to everyone and they scanned it in their heads-up displays, lower in their vision than the wall display. JieMin nodded.
“This is pretty much what I expected. As long as they know what needs doing, they can do it. If not, they’re helpless.”
“Yes,” ChaoLi said. “If they have a recipe, they can cook. If they have plans, they can build. So what we need to do is transition people in the jobs on one list into the jobs on the other.”
“Jessica,” JuPing said, “how many people are employed in jobs that need transitioning? As a fraction of the total?”
“That’s the bad news,” Jessica said. “Taking a quick look, it’s more than half. It looks more like two-thirds.”
“Ouch,” Paul said.
“Now what do we do?” JuPing asked.
“Think about it some more,” Jessica said. “Stay on it, JieMin.”
“Yes, Chen Zumu,” JieMin said.
“ChaoLi,” MinChao said, “you should probably also speak with Planetary Chairman Nieman about this. They may have faced similar issues when robots first became available in large numbers on Playa.”
“Yes, Chen Zufu,” ChaoLi said.