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ROBOTS!!!

I've been trying to unload paper magazines for about 15 years now and some of the most beautiful artifacts I've had to part with are those old Omni mags from the 1980s. They did fiction (Gibson, Stirling, etc) and science tidbits and interviews with scientists and various other thinkers. In March 1985 was an interview with Edward de Bono who had an provacative suggestion: that "workers and unions, instead of retreating before robots, should take the initiative and get to own the robots, then lease them to the factory. I suggest a trinity concept betweeen finance companies, management and suppliers of labor or robots." Now this is a very bold idea which obviously never took hold: abstract the physical action applied to mass-produced sequences. But De Bono had another idea that can now be found in many a "wish it had happened thus" text, including for example Cradle to Cradle, where a factory's inputs should be downstream of its outputs and that lends to the notion that it doesn't pollute its own water and, by extension, anyone's water.

[Update from 2020: I've finally finished the last of my print magazines: No Depression and Civilization]

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