the research fellowship

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968), Buckminster Fuller relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space, and shares some ideas about how humanity might navigate it, since there is no instruction manual and its resources are finite. In the following passage, BF discusses abundance and social transformation resulting from machines’ ability to multiply physical productivity.

“It is easy to demonstrate to those who will take the time and the trouble to unbias their thoughts that automation swiftly can multiply the physical energy part of wealth much more rapidly and profusely than can man’s muscle and brain-reflexed-manually-controlled production. On the other hand humans alone can foresee, integrate, and anticipate the new tasks to be done by the progressively automated wealth-producing machinery. To take advantage of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed intelligently by humans and unblock automation’s postponement by organized labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking. Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live […]

Given their research and development fellowship, many who have been frustrated during their younger years may feel like going fishing. Fishing provides an excellent opportunity to think clearly; to review one’s life; to recall one’s earlier frustrated and abandoned longings and curiosities. What we want everybody to do is to think clearly.

We soon will begin to generate wealth so rapidly that we can do very great things. I would like you to think what this may do realistically for living without spoiling the landscape, or the antiquities or the trails of humanity throughout the ages, or despoiling the integrity of romance, vision, and harmonic creativity. All the great office buildings will be emptied of earned living workers, and the automated office-processing of information will be centralized in the basements of a few buildings. This will permit all the modernly mechanized office buildings to be used as dwelling facilities.

When we approach our problems on a universal, general systems basis and progressively eliminate the irrelevancies, somewhat as we peel petals from an artichoke, at each move we leave in full visibility the next most important layer of factors with which we must deal. We gradually uncover you and me in the heart of now. But evolution requires that we comprehend each layer in order to unpeel it. We have now updated our definitions of universe by conforming them with the most recent and erudite scientific findings such as -those of Einstein and Planck. Earlier in our thinking we discovered man’s function in universe to be that of the most effective metaphysical capability experimentally evidenced thus far within our locally observable phases and time zones of universe. We have also discovered that it is humanity’s task to comprehend and set in order the special case facts of human experience and to win therefrom knowledge of the a priori existence of a complex of generalized, abstract principles which apparently altogether govern all physically evolving phenomena of universe.”

Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. (1895-1938) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.