--Frank Herbert, "Dune"
The interconnectedness of events is often surprising. Last month, I wrote a post ("A bad idea abandoned") about the removal of the final reminders of a "bad idea" -- the once-proposed R. H. Thompson freeway. The freeway was to have paralleled I-5 on the east side of Seattle. For the past month, construction workers have been removing access ramps between east-west State Route 520 and a freeway that was never built.
Today, I read a disconcerting article in the New York Times discussing the manner in which automation results, and will continue to result, in ever-increasing unemployment, unemployment that appears structural, not cyclical. Fewer and fewer jobs exist that can't now be, or won't soon be, handled as well or better by a computer. For the first time in modern history, technological advances may create a permanent, rather than temporary, decrease in the number of human workers required by society.
How will we handle a world in which wealth is increasing, but a smaller and smaller percentage of the population are wage earners?
Interesting and important questions, but where did I find an "interconnectedness"?
Science fiction writer Frank Herbert presented, in his Dune series of books, a civilization that had adapted to a form of Luddite revolution -- the "Butlerian jihad" -- thousands of years earlier. A religion had evolved out of that jihad, based largely on the commandment barring artificial intelligence quoted above.
Frank Herbert -- one of our own Northwest Corner writers, residing in Port Townsend, Washington -- named the jihad after a fictional historical character in his story. But he adopted the name "Butler" after one of his own real life buddies, an attorney from Stanwood named Frank Butler.
And what did attorney Butler do that inspired Herbert to use his name? Correct! Before becoming an attorney, Butler was a community organizer who helped set in motion the popular revolt that eventually led to the cancellation, in 1970, of the R. H. Thompson freeway.
Frank Butler is still very much alive according to Bar Association records, and still practicing law in Stanwood. He thus has a dual claim to the attention of history -- (1) a moving force in prevention of a freeway that would have marred a large portion of residential Seattle, and (2) as a consequence, the inspiration for Dune's eponymous "Butlerian jihad."
Well done, Mr. Butler.
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