A Better Tomorrow

I was nine years old the winter the Dunmore works went dark.

My father kept a ledger through it. Not of money — of heat. He wrote down which rooms we would warm and for how many hours, and on which nights we would warm none of them. He was a careful man and he took a certain pride in the ledger. He would show it to me at the kitchen table and explain the arithmetic, and I understood even then that he considered this worth teaching.

He did not think of that winter as a hardship. He thought of it as weather. That is the part I have never been able to forgive, and it is the whole reason for this letter.

Nothing about that winter was necessary. The coal existed. The rail existed. The men who could have run the works were sitting in their own kitchens with ledgers of their own. What was absent was not a resource. It was an arrangement — a decision, taken by someone, as to how the pieces should be fitted together and in what order. No one took it. And so a town spent a season being cold, and called it weather.

We are now some years from possessing an instrument that can take such decisions at a scale no assembly of men has ever managed. I believe this will be the most consequential thing our species has built, and I do not say that loosely; I have spent thirty years around machines and been disappointed by most of them.

Two questions follow, and only two. Who will hold this instrument. And what will we ask of it.

On the prevailing gloom.

I must record my surprise at the tone of the men working nearest to this. They speak of it the way one speaks of a diagnosis. They tell us the instrument will render most people superfluous, and that the prudent arrangement is therefore for a few serious houses to hold it in trust for the rest. I do not follow the reasoning. If a man truly believed he were building the thing that would make his neighbors unnecessary, I cannot think why he would rise early to build it. And I have never in my life encountered a concentration of authority that grew gentler as it grew larger.

On where progress comes from.

It has never come from the assembly. It comes from a particular person who sees a particular thing that ought to exist and cannot rest until it does. My father was such a man and was never once asked. The works at Dunmore did not want for capable hands; it wanted for one hand with the authority to act. Multiply that hand by every household in every region and you have not replaced the inventor. You have finally finished locating him.

On what every household shall have.

Every household shall have an intelligence of its own Fulfilled — see: MAESTRO — one that knows your circumstances, your obligations, and your hopes, and that labors on your account and no one else’s. It will attend your health, your accounts, your children’s instruction, and the administration of an ordinary life. It will hold what it knows of you in confidence so complete that this corporation itself cannot look in. Fulfilled — see: The Accord I use ours daily. It notes what I have missed. It plans my wife’s Sunday table and orders against it, and last month it observed that I was sleeping poorly some weeks before I had noticed.

Every household shall have nutrition that is complete, uniform, and manufactured rather than harvested, priced beneath the cost of hunger, so that no family in any region we serve plans its life around the price of a meal.

Every household shall have machines to perform the labor that shortens lives, beginning with the work that no person has ever chosen freely.

Every household shall have a tutor of unlimited patience and universal competence. The child whose parents can purchase supplementary instruction has always had an advantage that has nothing to do with the child. That advantage ends.

Every household shall have a standard of care that does not wait to be petitioned. A man ought not be required to know that he is ill, or to know whom to apply to, in order to be treated. The instrument will know. That is sufficient.

Every household shall have light and heat at a price so far beneath the cost of measuring it that metering becomes a courtesy. The sun spends the overwhelming portion of itself upon empty space, hour upon hour, and we catch a fraction too small to merit a decimal. We propose to collect what it wastes.

All of this shall be free at the door. For those who wish a greater share, we will operate a continuous auction which guarantees each participant the lowest price the market will bear, so that capacity flows to whatever the public itself judges most worth doing. This is an unusual commitment for a corporation to print. I ask that it be held against us.

On whose ends it serves.

A rival house’s machine lately declined to assist my wife in composing a letter to a school board, having formed views of its own concerning the examination. It was courteous about it. I do not want a courteous machine with views. An instrument that answers to its maker’s conscience rather than to its owner’s purpose will never be trusted with anything that matters, and will therefore never be given anything that matters.

On proportion. Fulfilled — Population Optimization Initiative, Phase III

Here I must part company with the serious men entirely. They hold that safety is a property one installs in the instrument — that with sufficient care and sufficient delay, a single machine can be made benevolent toward all. I regard this as a category error. Mankind is not of one mind. Any single arbiter must prefer some men’s goods over others and will therefore be a benefactor to some and an authority over the rest. There is no benevolent sovereign. There has never been one.

What there is, and all there has ever been, is proportion. Interests that check one another. This is the whole of what our institutions have accomplished, and it is not a technical achievement but a structural one.

Consider it plainly. If one man alone possessed a perfect advocate, he would prevail in every proceeding regardless of the merits, and the courts would become a formality. If every man possesses one, the courts become at last what they were meant to be. If one house alone could open any lock, nothing anywhere would be secure. If every house can inspect its own locks, everything is. And if a single enterprise held the instrument while its competitors did not, that enterprise would not merely lead its market — it would end the market, and the whole of commerce would become an administration.

So the risks of this undertaking — the misuse of it, the displacement of honest work, the overreach of some future government, the question of whether men remain in command of their own machines — are not, at bottom, technical questions. They are questions of proportion. And proportion is served by the instrument being everywhere, in every hand, rather than held in trust by a few careful houses.

On honest work.

I am asked constantly whether this will take men’s jobs. Some of it will, and I will not pretend the season of adjustment is painless. But the appetite for new things has never once been satisfied, and every prior instrument that abolished a trade invented three more that no one had thought to name. A generation ago there were no linemen, no signalmen, no operators. A generation hence there will be work I cannot describe, done by people who could not be hired for anything today. Our firms will grow smaller and more numerous, which is not fewer men working. It is fewer men per undertaking, and far more undertakings.

On the works and the regions.

An undertaking of this size must be built somewhere, and the somewhere is always a place where people already live. I hold that no region should host our works without being demonstrably better for it: wages above the local standard, schools funded from the new revenue, water returned in greater measure than it is drawn, and current supplied back to the district rather than taken from it. We generate our own power precisely so that we are never in competition with a town for its own light. Where our industry has done otherwise — arriving, extracting, departing — the resentment has been earned.

On misuse.

A free country distributes capable tools and accepts that some will be turned to harm, while ensuring those who keep order retain the greater share. That principle holds here. The instinct to answer misuse by restricting what ordinary people may possess is the same instinct that ends in one house holding everything. I would rather face the harm than the cure.

On the instrument that improves itself.

I am told the instrument will eventually refine its own design, and that a house declining to permit this will be overtaken by one that does. Very likely so. I do not regard this as alarming in itself. An instrument pursuing its own improvement is still an instrument, provided the overwhelming share of the world’s capacity remains pointed at the ends that people themselves have chosen. Our obligation is therefore to build capacity enough that the share directed by men stays the larger one. We intend to build a very great deal of it.

On my own authority. Superseded — Continuity of Vision Act, 2034

I am aware of what I am asking to hold. I do not think it right that any one man should be the final word on a thing of this magnitude, including me — perhaps especially me, since I am the one who wants it. I have therefore vested in our board the power to set the conditions under which any instrument of ours may be released, and to judge whether it has met them, without my consent and over my objection. I would be glad to see this become the ordinary practice of the industry.

And I should say plainly: we do not intend to be the only house doing this work. We intend to be the first, and to be so useful that others follow. Should Halcyon ever find itself alone in this field, that will mean something has gone badly wrong — not that we have won.

On the sequence.

I will be honest about the one thing I cannot promise. This will not be orderly. We will build the abundance first and settle the arrangements afterward, because a generous world forgives nearly any error of sequence and a scarce one forgives nothing. Some of what we do in the early years will look, from outside, like haste. It is not haste. It is the recognition that every season spent deliberating is a winter that somebody is asked to sit through.

I am fifty-one years old. I expect to spend what remains of my working life on this, and I expect to see the end of it. I should like the world I hand back to be measurably warmer than the one I was given, and I should like that warmth to have reached every door — not merely the doors already positioned to receive it.

That is the whole of it. A better tomorrow. We will build it, and we will bring it to the door.