Damien Broderick reflects on the nature of poverty in a nano-future

Jim Pethokoukis interviewed our Aussie transhumanist SF author friend Damien Broderick for Next News:

What trend(s)—technological, social, economic, political—do you often hear talked about but think may not play out the way people expect, if at all?

Broderick: People often worry about increasing inequality—the rich getting obscenely richer while the poor sink lower. Actually this seems only partly true—the poor, in the First and the Third worlds, are also getting richer, but not as fast, and they lag further behind the rich all the time. Does this matter? For the truly poor, and the cruelly outcast, of course it does. For those with only 25-inch TV screens instead of the huge plasma sets they’d prefer to own, it’s worth recalling that both the rich and the poor in 1904 had none at all, nor any antibiotics and rudimentary medical care, even if they could pay for it. But this might eventually be moot. Developing technologies such as molecular manufacture—nanotechnology—will allow the very engines of productivity to be copied cheaply and distributed widely. If that happens (and it will only occur if we find ways to prevent portable nanofactories from making lethal weapons available to any child or psychopath), the gap between rich and "poor" might not sting as much.

I don't know about you Damien, but I wouldn't be that happy if I knew there were people 100s of times more powerful, wealthy, intelligent and long-lived around, and all I got out of the TechnoRapture was a plasma TV and a nanofactory. I've got a job, a laptop and a suburban home now and I'm still pissed off that Bush and the corporate cabal run the damn world.