IIRC (it’s been a year or so since I last read it), they had recycling, and acknowledged that the resources were finite, but had calculated that for the limited amount of people they admitted, they would last long enough to figure something else out. I may be misremembering.

As someone that works in robotics, I can say that most jobs are safe until long after I'm dead

Title updated with year.

I did not realize that it was that old.

I read this many years ago. I do think for being written in 2003 it's interesting to read again now and see in the last 20 years what parts seem more or less plausible.

I think the nice thing about science fiction is that even bad science fiction can contain within interesting ideas. Sorta like pizza, even bad pizza is pretty good.

Using a scanner in an Amazon Warehouse felt a bit like that, just with the need to memorize the warehouse layout so one would know which way to turn at the end of an aisle.

I'm rather surprised there hasn't been much discussion on Manna before, such a great novella.

How does that matter? The sentence doesn't actually say "millions of fast-food businesses", it's emphasizing the popularity of a manager/employee work relationship without being limited to fast-food.

Also, the word "business" is often used in a way that refers to particular stores or sites, rather than always meaning a top-level corporate legal-ownership entity. You can point at a local boarded-over Starbucks and say "that business closed" without meaning a global shutdown.

You are in for a treat then. The last episode of season 1 is nothing short of amazing.

I've read this a few times over the years. Always amusing to experience the shift from totally believable to totally absurd as the second view is presented.

people who like this might like ernest callenbach's "ecotopia" (from 1975), and cory doctorow's "walkaway", which cover some of the same themes.

Another fun read from Marshall Brain: "The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches" available on Amazon.

It's a story I cite fairly often.

A few others which examine this sort of thing are:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella)

- https://qntm.org/mmacevedo (originally published as: https://qntm.org/lena )

and I can never miss a chance to recommend "Raindrop" from Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_)

At some point in the future one hopes that a technology will be developed which allows doing more than just pillaging the earth's resources for some additional comfort/convenience/energy, agriculture and improvements on it would be that, except that by making Malthus wrong, they've just increased the number of people for whom problems need to be resolved --- computing had the potential to do this, but the discussion about taxing CPUs to fund a universal basic income or even job re-training for displaced workers never got out the gate --- solar may be the first such, but it really needs more adoption, and an implementation which doesn't depend on batteries which added a fifth item to the resources humans plunder:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world

(the newcomer is lithium, the others were sand, salt, copper, and oil)

We keep crossing tipping points which no one talks about much:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/

and folks have been writing science fiction stories on this sort of thing since _Make Room, Make Room!_ (and the public is moderately familiar with the movie version _Soylent Green_)

What technologies or social changes offer an escape hatch?

- cold fusion?

- making limestone out of CO2 in warm moist air (needs abundant energy and either an affordable/available reagent or a new process)

- switching folks from eating beef to something else?

- desalination (needs abundant energy, and a compleatness which will prevent issues such as: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S106422931502009X )

I recall reading this and assuming it was less than a decade away.

As of 2023 This is almost precisely the scheduling system for:

-Uber/Lyft

-Target stocking

-Amazon delivery

-Amazon box packing

It’s already here. It’s pervasive and increasing in frequency and pervasiveness

I see no reason this isn’t coming to replace Project Management

GPT-6 to CTO:

“Your JIRA backlog and iteration are ready for you to start. 33 stories and I’ve prioritized them for you based on commits from previous 17 iterations, feedback from customers that were contributing user monitoring data and what was expected to meet board approved quarterly metrics. Remember, make sure that you remind all committing bots and employees to send commits to GPT-PR to review before sending to CI/CD”

Rate this iteration project plan :thumbsup: :thumbsdown: