In Diaspora we talk a little bit about what changes when technology advances or falls. In a nutshell, we propose that any given technology goes from impossible to government use to corporate use to private use. For our game our interest here is space travel — to begin with it is impossible to get people into space. One day it becomes possible, but the resources require cooperation on the scale of a government project (including the resource of mandating behaviour). Eventually it becomes profitable and the scale changes again and now a corporation can get into space (and this is where we are or are heading here and now). Finally, it becomes something that a single person or family can afford to do. It moves from profitable to leisure in some sense.

This progression happens because of the empowering function of automation.

As technology advances, from the ground you and I see gadgetry first. I can hold my entire record collection from 1984 on a single tiny device (with room to spare — lots of room to spare) and play it to myself for longer than I can actually tolerate before the batteries run down (not to necessarily imply that I am getting great battery life from my player). But gadgetry doesn’t actually create a huge amount of change — the big change in music is that I can click a button and get more music whereas in 1984 I had to catch a bus to a record store and back, carrying a fragile artifact home. Carrying more music than I actually care to listen to is a remote second for social impact.

Automation increases individual empowerment. Empowering individuals through automation causes the capability of the individual to encroach on the capability of last year’s corporation (by which I only mean a large scale organization of humans with a directed purpose — this is not an anti-capitalist screed by any reading). Obviously this touches on my recent experiences with publishing and with publishers: the individual is now fully capable of doing almost everything that last year’s publishers were necessary to do. I can write, buy art, create art, lay out, print, cut, make books, present for sale, and fulfill all from my desk. I even do all my marketing from my desk, now, but that’s not as effective as these other things are. That’s an important hole, though, and I’ll come back to it. So anyway, with respect to publishing, an individual is now potentially as empowered to produce as a corporation once was.

Technically the publishing example is one of a more important effect: the aggregation of automated individuals. My personal capability with respect to publishing is actually because my communication with a small number of other people is managed in an automatic fashion, and the bulk of their work is also automated. I do my work, press a button to submit to an Entity. They get my data, store it, and present it for sale. When an interested party clicks BUY they handle the money, submit the data to a fulfillment Entity automatically, and keep track of things so they can pay me my share. The fulfillment Entity takes the data, turns it into a high-quality books, and hands it to a shipping Entity. They get it to the customer’s door. Each Entity could be a single person except where automation has not quite caught up (like shipping, though it’s getting very good these days too). Some Entities don’t need to be people at all any more.

So let’s say that automation increases my individual power by a factor of two. This means that when n people so empowered choose to interact, their effective output is 2ⁿ. The potential of aggregated individual effort is an exponential function of the effect of automation on each. That’s why automation changes everything, and that’s why there are technological leaps in Diaspora that have the character they do — what humans do doesn’t change all that much except insofar as they do less of what they dislike (generally), but how much they can do does change. And the output of their aggregation is greater.

We could talk now about the costs of communication — how every indirection of communication results in a loss of data between humans because all communication between humans is a form of translation and all human translation is lossy. Then we could see that communication between automatic entities does not necessarily suffer from this, and then see instantly why some efficiencies in automation exist. Then we would also see that organizations beyond a certain size must have some indirect communication (chain of command and cross-discipline communication, for example). So if we now see that automation decreases the size of an organization for the same output, we also see that this output is magnified in quality and quantity when the decrease in size similarly decreases the amount of indirect communication. There are max-min equations to be done here, but there is a moving target that changes with specific industry and degree of automation, that pays off in millions when you hit it: the optimal organization size. This trick never works, though, because organizations acquire meta-interests that include growth, which is broken. See also: dinosaurs.

Regarding publishing, this means that publishers already embody substantial functionality that is being automated to the individual level. As I look around, it seems they know this though most are still steering big-ship-slow and not necessarily in the right direction. Many concentrate on the gadget (we should ePublish!) which is treating symptoms. Treating symptoms offers some relief, but you will probably still die of the disease. Some resist the automation (laughing at self-publishers as though there were a relation to vanity-presses, which have a justifiably evil reputation). The ones that will be present in thirty years are the ones that recognize what isn’t automated and what isn’t likely automatable soon, and selling that service hard. That will put authors in the driver’s seat, though, and neither party seems all that used to that yet. Yet.

So, Diaspora, yeah. Automation changes everything. When you wonder what a T3 culture looks like, realise first that individuals here could have (that is, barring social repression or poverty or other obstacles to ownership) access to automation that gives them the power of T2 corporations or T1 governments because of automation. That means that it doesn’t make sense that a T3 gun can kill a nation. It does mean that a T3 individual might credibly have the resources to divert asteroids into planets through use of automatic manufacture of automatic spacecraft that navigate automatically to places that have been surveyed automatically and station-keep automatically around asteroids identified automatically so that their orbit is altered catastrophically.

Automation is the key and not gadgetry.

–BMurray