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With robots to do all menial labor, and Sophotech to do all intellectual
labor, the only category of economic activities open to mankind in the Golden
Age was entrepreneurial speculation. In effect, man only had to dream of
something that might amuse his fellow man. or render some small service,
ameliorate some perceived imperfection in life, and command his machines to
carry out the project, in order to reap profits to more than pay for the
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rental on those machines.
The immensity of the wealth involved, however, did not revoke any of the laws
of economics known since antiquity. The law of association still proved that a
superior and an inferior, when both cooperate and specialize, are more
efficient working together than when working in isolation. No matter how wise
and great their machines, humans always had more than enough to do. An
extremely fine specialization of labor, including labor that, to earlier eras,
would seem quite frivolous, allowed for nearly infinite avenues of effort to
be utilized. The high population of the time was nothing but a boon; an
entrepreneur need only reach the most tiny fraction of the public in order for
his patrons to be numbered in the millions and billions.
Wage rates (which, by and large, were the rental rates of laboring machines)
were allowed to fall to whatever level was needed to clear the market of
labor; likewise for interest rates clearing the capital market. The evils and
follies created by the interventions of governments into the market were
unknown in the Golden Age; nor, among the long-lived people of that era, could
doctrines based on short-term thinking or short-sightedness take root. There
was neither unemployment (except as a penalty inflicted by the Hortators) nor
capital lying idle, nor squandered. There was, of course, no central bank.
no debasement of currency, or other mischievous intermeddling with the
economy.
Every great achievement of the superscience of the era, rather than sating the
human desire for accomplishments, led to a wider threshold of what ambition
could accomplish; and these greater powers led in turn to the desire for ever
greater achievements. Engineering efforts that would have been impossible in
the poverty of prior eras, including engineering on a planetary scale, were
practical in the Golden Age.
NAMING CONVENTIONS
The complexity of the possible social and neurological arrangements into which
the peoples and self-aware artifacts of the Golden Age could organize
themselves was reflected in the diverse information carried by their formal
names.
This information was usually carried in a header or prefix of standard
electronic net-to-net communication, to allow the recipient to translate the
response into a mutually comprehensible format and language. For humans using
physical bodies, the names were translated into spoken syllables, usually in
an abbreviated form.
The naming conventions were not entirely uniform, although most names would
contain the same basic information, not necessarily in the same order.
For example, take the name Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment)
Uncomposed, Inde-pconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola,
Era 10191 (the "Reawakening").
"Phaethon" is the name of his outward identity, his public character. This
only roughly corresponded to the Christian name (or first name) of an earlier
age; it was a piece of intellectual property that could be bought and sold,
and might also have copyright-protected facial features and expressions, body
language, slang phrases, mottoes, or logos to go with it.
"Prime" indicates that he is the original copy of this mind content, not a
partial, or a reconstruction, or a ghost. Among sequential iterations of the
same consciousness, this is a sequence number. By the final era of the Golden
Age, this name had fallen out of strict use, and many people listed fanciful
numbers, such as Nought or Myriad.
"Rhadamanth" is the copyrighted reference to his genotype, that is, what the
ancients would call a family name. In this particular case, Phaethon's family
is named after his mansion. Both the genotype and mansion were created by his
sire. Members of other schools would employ this name differently, or would
leave it blank; but in general it was meant to reflect on the creator or [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]