Free The Future by Al Gore

middle-income wage earners is beginning to have a noticeable impact on aggregate demand—particularly in consumer-oriented societies.
    O N A GLOBAL basis, offshoring and robosourcing are together pushing the economy toward a simultaneous weakening of demand and surplus of production. The use of Keynesian stimulus policies—that is, government borrowing to finance temporary increases in aggregate demand—may become less effective over time as the secular, systemic shift to an economy with far fewer jobs relative to production represents a larger cause of declining incomes, and thus declining consumption and demand. In addition, as I’ll detail later, unprecedented demographic shifts include a larger proportion of older, retired people in industrial countries whose incomes are already replaced by programs such as SocialSecurity—thereby limiting the ability of governments to replace income indefinitely to working age people.
    Unless the lost income of the unemployed and underemployed factory workers in industrial countries can somehow be replaced, global demand for the products of the new highly automated factories will continue to decline. The industrial economies, after all, continue to provide the greatest share of global demand and consumption. Higher wages paid to workers in developing and emerging economies are far more likely—in part for cultural reasons—to go into savings instead of consumption. While both labor and capital have been globalized, the bulk of consumption in the world economy remains in wealthy industrial countries. This results in a mismatch between the distribution of income and the central role of consumption in driving global economic growth.
RETHINKING RESOURCES
    These accelerating changes will therefore require us to reimagine the now central role of consumption in our economy and simultaneously replace the flows of income to workers that presently empower consumption. The current connection between ever rising levels of consumption and the health of the global economy is increasingly unstable in any case.
    The accelerating technology revolution is not only transforming the role of labor and capital as factors of production in the global economy, it is also transforming the role of resources. The new technologies of molecular manipulation have led to revolutionary advances in the materials sciences and brand-new hybrid materials that possess a combination of physical attributes far exceeding those of any materialsdeveloped through the much older technologies of metallurgy and ceramics. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin predicted more than sixty years ago, “In becoming planetized, humanity is acquiring newphysical powers which will enable it to super-organize matter.”
    The new field of advanced materials science involves the study, manipulation, and fabrication of solid matter with highly sophisticated tools, almost on an atom-by-atom basis. It involves many interdisciplinary fields, including engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology. The new insights being developed into the ways that molecules control and direct basic functions in biology, chemistry, and the interaction of atomicand subatomic processes that form solid matter is speeding up the emergence of what some experts are callingthe molecular economy.
    Significantly, the new molecules and materials created need not be evaluated through the traditional, laborious process of trial and error. Advanced supercomputers are now capable of simulating the way these novel creations interact with other molecules and materials, allowing the selection of only the ones that are most promising forexperiments in the real world. Indeed, the new field known as computational science has now been recognized as a third basic form of knowledge creation—alongside inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning—and combines elements of the first two by simulating an artificial reality that functions as a much more concrete form of hypothesis and allows