Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future [Kindle Edition]

Marshall Brain (Author)

Book Description

Robots will soon begin taking human jobs in places like retail stores, fast food restaurants, construction sites and transportation. The key technology that will fuel the transition is inexpensive computer vision systems, and the number of human jobs at risk numbers in the tens of millions. More than half of the jobs in the United States could be eliminated.

With half of the jobs eliminated by robots, what happens to all the people who are out of work? Marshall Brain's book Manna explores the possibilities and shows two contrasting outcomes, one filled with great hope and the other quite uncomfortable.

Join Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com, for a skillful step-by-step walk through the robotic transition, the collapse of the human job market that results and an surprising look at humanity's future in a post-robotic world.

Then consider our options. Which vision of the future will society choose to follow?

About the Author

Marshall Brain is best known as the founder of HowStuffWorks.com. Marshall started the site as a hobby in 1998 and it was purchased for $250 million by Discovery Communications in 2007.

As a well-known public speaker, Marshall frequently appears on radio and TV programs nationwide. He has appeared on everything from The Oprah Winfrey Show to CNN. He is the host of National Geographic's "Factory Floor With Marshall Brain".

Marshall has written more than a dozen books and a number of widely known publications.

Today Marshall resides in Cary, NC with his wife and four children.

You can learn more about Marshall Brain at http://MarshallBrain.com

Product Details

• File Size: 166 KB
• Print Length: 79 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: BYG Publishing, Inc.; 1 edition (March 5, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007HQH67U
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #43,675 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Mechanical > Robotics
  • #4 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Computer Technology > Robotics & Automation
  • #51 in Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Computer Technology

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars All Watched Over By Machines of (Choose Only One): A) Brutal Efficiency or B) Loving Grace March 9, 2012

By Bob Blum

Amazon Verified Purchase

A few days ago (March 3, 2012) I heard Marshall Brain give a
riveting talk to the Stanford Transhumanist Association.
What will be the fate of humanity in a future world
populated by supersmart AIs and robots.
His message: basically, we're toast.

According to Brain, the future will bring increasing unemployment
as broad swaths of humanity are replaced by robots. As a consequence,
wealth will continue to concentrate in the hands of a privileged few,
with the great majority (the 99%) being forced into grinding poverty.
(You've heard this before from, say, Karl Marx - but it gets even more bleak.)

As the AIs become ever more powerful they may come to regard
us first as chimpanzees, then as chickens, and finally as bacteria.
How will the AIs deal with us? Possibilities include extermination,
zoos, prisons, and tailor-made virtual reality utopias
(Heavenly or Eden-like versions of The Matrix.)

Scary stuff, but is it true? Yeah, it might happen.

In a brief chat afterward, I told him the best
I could see for humanity in a post-Singularity world
was planet Earth as a retirement home for humanity - watched over
by "machines of loving grace." Perhaps not the exuberant vision
that you're used to, but not that different from real life.
Now, you get old and die, but you get to see
an improved, next generation carry the torch forward.
Post-Singularity, it's just that the machines are carrying the torch
(directing planetary affairs, doing the real innovation, and going to the stars.)

Ok, now back to the book. Having been primed for a nonstop trip
to Hell, the vision portrayed in the book was actually a relief. Although the
images of minimum wage employment enforced by a silicon Big Brother
are bleak to my Western eyes, as expertly portrayed by Marshall,
they might be a welcome relief to many in Asian sweatshops
(think of the rash of suicides at Foxconn.)

Toward the end of this novella, he transitions to a far more
optimistic, alternative future with greatly expanded freedom and opportunities.
That alternative society (also involving tight integration with and supervision by
AIs) is described in fascinating detail.

The work is a detailed dystopian extrapolation in the tradition of
Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. The technical details are as expertly
and believably detailed as one would expect from the inventor of HowStuffWorks.
Brain is a social critic to be taken seriously, and this is an engaging work.

While I enjoyed reading a review copy on my Kindle,
the work is also available for free on the internet.
He wants the work to be widely read, and it should be.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Manna slavery to post-scarcity open-source society March 11, 2012

By Jarek

Amazon Verified Purchase

The Manna short story carries two powerful, yet plausible messages about our near future. In this story advancing machine intelligence amplifies the lost of democracy and the concentration of wealth. Robert Reich's Supercapitalism wins. Or so it seems - open source anarchy to the rescue!
An interesting and eye opening trip.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly Visionary May 11, 2012

By Jeri Lynn

Amazon Verified Purchase

This thought provoking novella is a must read! Unfortunately, the utopian resource-based economy described in the latter half of the book is much less likely to occur than the oppressive Orwellian structure of future societies dominated by a wealthy minority in charge of the robots. Inevitably, robotic technology will advance and machines will replace a significant number of people in the work force. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that the working and middle classes are in the process of becoming obsolete. It's only a matter of long it will take.