Why is our lovely Republican government cowering from the future?  They keep looking the wrong way.  (Coal!)  With them blocking everything, we’re not even trying to deal with the most obvious risks.  Instead, Republicans are piling all the consequences onto our children.  It’s just like Russia or the deficit that way, so I shouldn’t be surprised.  It isn’t just that Republicans are ignoring the next round of technological disruptions; they’re fighting against any adaptation.  I only have suspicions about why, but their lack of any action is obvious enough.

I remember when we used to make new stuff.  Remember the Internet?  That was kind of cool, once.  We had lots of keen ideas, from canals and railroads to spaceflight.  As a nation, we’ve made lots of stuff that shook things up and left us richer as a nation.  You know, electrification, safe water, mail, roads, interstates, electric lights, satellites, freedom of speech, that kind of thing?  It seems like we used to do new stuff every few years.  Not as much recently.

But it’s not like we have a choice about changing. There are a ton of new and disruptive changes barreling toward us whether we want it or not.  We can all see it, off in the distance there.  Just look down the tracks we’re standing on right now.  See that light slowly getting brighter as it barrels right at us?  That’s it.

I’m talking easy stuff to see.  None of these should take anyone by surprise.  But we’re doing diddly, and I’ll bet Republicans will manage to act all surprised, up in their high, protected perch, when the next set of changes plow through their constituents.

In no special order, let me start with electric cars.  After Toyota’s hybrid got popular, and then Tesla’s full electric cars blew down doors, most major car makers shifted toward making more electric cars.  Yearly production is going to spike (Disclosure: I own an electric car, and I love it; I’m never buying another gas car.)

Electric cars will disrupt quite a few things.  First, of course, there’s the ‘no gas’ part.  The added electricity isn’t free, but it’s roughly a quarter the cost of gasoline, mile for mile, and it’s cleaner and more convenient.  Oil companies are looking at a possible drop in demand, which hurts profits.  Oil companies aren’t wonderfully elastic, so smaller changes have big effects.  Charging these new cars will take a lot of power, so we’re looking at increased demand on the electric grid.  (Before you ask, no, it’s unlikely that power companies will make that power by burning spare gasoline or diesel fuel.)  Add in the booming rooftop solar market, and the electric power market is looking at several important disruptions.

(Republicans seem to hate solar, even though solar is a booming industry spinning off jobs and huge amounts of income.  It’s perverse.  Republicans keep trying to undercut solar as if that simple idea offends them personally.  Is that a conservative principle I missed?)

Anyway, electric cars.  It’s not just the ‘no gas’ part.  Compared to gas engines, electric cars are bone-simple machines.  My car is a big battery, four tires, two electric motors and a box.  With seats.  Sure, I love not buying gas, but there’s more.  Complexity is expensive to keep up.  With an electric car, there’s a lot of stuff I get to stop paying for: no oil changes, no antifreeze, no spark plugs, no high-tension wires, no distributors, transmission bands, coils, clutches, ATF, steering fluid, bad water pumps, leaking radiators, blown hoses, clogged air filters, PVC valves, questionable oil filters, and on and on.  Brushless electric motors are amazingly reliable.  They just run, quietly and smoothly.

We’ve been paying the maintenance costs so long, we’ve forgotten that gasoline and diesel motors are incredibly complex machines with a gazillion moving parts.  We just accept 5000-mile checkups.  We gloss over auto maintenance.  We simply accept that our expensive cars wear out after just a few years of mild use.  If you’re poor, you learn to accept POS cars that are unreliable or struggle to work without a car at all.  Ever have a morning where your car didn’t start?  Not me; not so much anymore.

Now, add commercial shipping into all that.  That’s a big part of our lives that we don’t see as much if you’re not in the business. The raw materials for everything we use get transported, they get worked into something else, then transported again.  They get repackaged and shipped somewhere else.  They get assembled, transported, reworked, transported, sold wholesale, transported, sold retail, transported again, and then we transport the waste to dumps after we’re done with it.  You get the drift.  I’m not just talking about electric cars.  The new Tesla semi rigs are just as disruptive.

So electric vehicles threaten oil company profits.  That one’s easy.  But if electric cars and trucks don’t break as much, that threatens all those mechanics and garages we have to pay to keep our gas cars running.  It’s good for all of us as a nation when we can get the same result for less cost and effort, but we’ll lose some jobs on the way, which is bad for a few of us.  That uneven result is how disruption works.  Now add in the spark plug makers, the air filter manufacturers, Jiffy-Lube, AAMCO, and the rest, and all their suppliers up and down the supply chain.  That’s another chunk of people who might have employment problems soon.

Are we doing anything about that?  No?  Huh.

So a lot of people are at risk.  And no, we can’t just leave them behind.  I’m not just altruistic; I’m talking macroeconomics.  If we get richer every time America becomes more productive, we all get a little poorer when formerly productive people fall onto the dole.  It’s bad for them, and bad for all the rest of us in lots of little ways.  If you want your nation to stay rich, try to avoid filling the place with lots of poor, unhappy, disenfranchised people who can’t get jobs.  They’re just not good company.

Job obsolescence is something we’ll be forced to deal with whether we want to or not. Seems to me that dealing with that now would be a lot nicer and cheaper than waiting until after we have an entire industry driven into economic ruin.

So, electric cars will be a disruptive change.  It’s not hard to see that one coming.  So why aren’t we doing anything?  It’s not like Republicans have been shy about picking winners and losers.  (How’s that coal and steel revitalization going?)  Are Republicans hoping that if they undercut electric charging stations badly enough, people will give up and forget about it?  Are they just so completely controlled by big oil and big auto they don’t even think about it?

I wrote in Assault Rifles and CNC Mills about one consequence of cheap CNC mills: it lets people manufacture their own guns.  It’ll disrupt our entire gun regulation infrastructure as well as undercut the horrific profit models that fuel the gun makers and their NRA puppet.  (OK, I’m a little happy about that last part.)  But what are we going to do about it when that takes off?  It’ll only be a few years from now.  It feels like we’re doing the opposite of ‘planning.’  Individual manufacturing like this is already important, and I’m sure there’ll be more capabilities before long.

Now add in the Maker movement, where people are working to make more and more of their stuff themselves.  3D printers are just getting started.  Once they can make strong, reliable stuff quickly, they’ll undercut a whole category of existing small manufacturing, while creating a different, entire new industry (or three) based around home-level fabrication.

In the US, we’re stuck with ‘regulatory capture.’  That’s where industries that we’re supposed to regulate have instead captured their oversight agencies, and run them for their direct benefit.  Some of the bigger examples (outside of the Republican party itself) are the Copyright Office and the Patent and Trade Office.  They’re so dedicated to corporate rights, we might as well move the agencies into the corporate office space entirely.  So imagine how interesting it’ll become when hardware design matters?  It’s coming soon.  Think they’ve made stealing pop songs a federal crime?  Just wait.

And we’re doing what?  Locking down corporation’s rights to prosecute people for stealing broadly defined intellectual property?  I’m sure that’ll serve us well.

Here’s another.  Think about all kinds of self-driving machines.  I know I want my car to have that big, red “HOME” button on the dash, but I’m not just talking cars.  Autonomous vehicles effect everything from trains and big-rig trucks down to those cute little robotic delivery carts I see negotiating the sidewalks downtown.  Imagine if moving stuff from here to there suddenly cost a lot less?  Suppose transportation — including personal transportation — suddenly got cheap, easy, and didn’t cost us tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of crippling injuries every year?  That’d be nice, right?  Not having to pay those direct transportation costs along with the indirect costs of lost people, hospitalization, crushed infrastructure, and so on.  That would leave us much richer as a nation.

Just don’t forget, in that perverse way of disruptions, that all those people who make their paychecks driving and delivering stuff are about to get stiffed, along with all their supply chains.

Own a car?  Add in another, minor disruption.  Suppose enough people decide that, instead of paying hundreds to thousands of dollars every month for a car, they can make do with autonomous, Uber-like rentals that can show up a few minutes after you call them.  Suddenly, every suburban family doesn’t have to buy themselves two or three cars.  Think that might be important to the economy?

This is the easy stuff to predict.

Instead, Republicans have gutted every planning or adaptation effort they can find.  Don’t even ask me about science programs.  Again, I have no factual reasons for why, but it’s pretty clear they’re stripping all that out.  Think about health and safety research, energy research, environmental research; it’s all being gutted as we speak, along with anything about materials or methods.  Republican appointees are scrubbing federal sites of most detailed past results at the same time that Trump’s budget zeros out the future for every program he personally dislikes, whether or not they’ve been effective or productive.

Not that there isn’t a long foot-dragging tradition, even when the new disruptions are obvious, but this is trying to hold back the tide.  The disruptions themselves are obvious, America can’t stop any of these changes, and we can’t even slow them down much.  We should be on top of things.  Instead, and for whatever reason, today’s Republican majority compares planning for the future as if they’d be promoting the newest communism.

We need to get on top of these things.  Now, while it’s cheap, and before the rest of the world eats our lunch.