Going over my list of the concerns people have expressed about the RBE ideas, the most common is that we will end up with the planet run by a techno-scientific elite. While this should not be an issue, it does need to be talked about.

First, what do we have now? In most nations we have a political elite making all those decisions. While some people feel like their vote controls who that political elite is, many of us recognize that, at best, our choices are limited to players considered acceptable to the political elite. Dig a bit deeper and you will see that generally it is corporate money which is controlling the choices and the presentation of the choices.

As Jacque Fresco says, "If you have a problem you want a technician, not a politician to solve it". (Well, that's at least close to a quote.) I can offer all too many examples, many from the nuclear industry, where input from a technical person was discarded by the politicians because it was not in their best interest. Note that I didn't say your best interest, I said theirs. That could be as simple as them wanting to make sure they would get reelected or something more sinister.

In an RBE, we eliminate the politicians. Thus, we get to hear the scientific input. The openness that is created by eliminating both political and corporate vested interests means true peer review of the information can take place.

Let's take an example. Let's say that a common building material for houses, call it material Z, is in short supply. A purely scientific evaluation of the situation should come up with alternatives. Materials X or Y may be a way around the problem or even a change that would significantly reduce the amount of Z required to build a house. The alternatives can be presented openly and peer evaluated.

With the current situation, the typical alternatives seem to be:

1. Find a way we can get as much Z as we need and to hell with others on the planet.
2. Because my politician owns a lot of stock in the company who produces X, he will try to bend the results such that X is the right answer.
3. Because making a change away from Z will be unpopular, my politician will promote the idea that we really have lots of Z available, thus delaying reality until after the election.

There are certainly other possibilities but you get the idea. Thus, in an RBE, the truth is what appears on the considerations list. Why? Because the advantage of deregulating the truth is not an advantage for anyone. That doesn't mean the scientists can't make mistakes but we are clearly moving in the right direction.

The next step is to turn as much of this science into decisions that are made by computers. That is, made unemotionally based on the knowledge we have. This also scares some people as they say they don't want their life controlled by computers but it is way too late for that.

While there are people still living on this planet without the benefit (or curse) of computers making decisions for them, they are few. To start with, if you are reading this article you are reading it on a computer. Your computer accessed a copy by sending a request over a world-wide network of computers. Along the way hundreds or possibly thousands of computers were involved in how this information, stored on one computer is, well, I actually don't even know where it is, gets delivered to your computer. All that happened automatically and transparently. I can assure you that you would not want to do this without the help of computers.

The same is true for telephone systems, your automobile, your CD player and so on. Computers make decisions for you all the time.

Is this new? Not at all. To offer one example from the early 1970s, the logging industry realized that there was quite a bit of waste cutting trees up into dimensional lumber. Why? Because humans were guessing what could be cut out of a particular tree. As the size of available trees were decreasing, the percentage waste was increasing.

Some people I knew wrote a program where the people at the sawmill could enter some dimensional information about a tree. The program would then offer the optimal cuts to make to maximize what could be cut from the tree.

Well, that's what we are talking about when we say that computers will make the decisions. It means that we will collect the data needed (much of which will, of course, be collected automatically), program the algorithms and let the computers (and an assortment of robots where needed) run things. If something is identified as non-optimal, there will be no politician in the way of fixing it.

Let me offer you a homework assignment. If you live in a city, think about the public transit system. Are there changes (technically good even if not politically good) that could be made to make the system more efficient and generally more useful for those living in the city?