Depending on how you place your category boundaries, 'purple', 'green', or 'yellow' would all be plausible. Does "small business owner" count as a job?

Yes, but its caste depends what the business is. My aunt runs an art gallery, that's a green small business.

Understood. In that case, purple is almost certainly still first - it seems to be most of the potential jobs - but everything depends on where you want to draw the Amentan line in a lot of places Imai* does not have lines - between green scholar and orange teacher, between purple craftsman and green artist, between yellow programmer and purple craftsman, between green actor and grey or orange sex worker, between grey soldier and yellow or purple technician... I feel as if yellow and green are the closest after purple, but I don't know. Purple, then yellow, then green, then orange, then red or grey, and blue last would be my guess? But it is not a confident guess.

He is not used to thinking in Amentan categories. It makes his head hurt.

Because I expect someone could make the argument that we are literally all yellows, because everything we do is feed information into computers, or at least that we have no greys, at least outside the occasional athlete, because of our lack of biological bodies.

So some caste liberalization is almost inevitable - it does bow to economic necessity, some, when there's nothing else for it to do. But the problem is keeping the reds intact till then.

I admit, I don't understand this very well. We need to make sure there's work for them? But surely

He pauses. Stares. Does not send it. The answer is obvious. 

The reds appear to be organized enough to pull off organized assassinations of roboticists. Should I assume that any attempt on their part to organize collective bargaining to be paid what they are worth would result in

Wait. No. Delete message. The answer is still obvious.

So literally the only limitation on the condition reds work is that there are the minimum number of reds to do the work, paid the amount where they have convinced the government that if they were paid less they would starve. Possibly - no, almost certainly - they would do more if they did not hate their government. No wonder the Amentans think replacing them with robots would be an improvement.

Sorry, I just had some delayed realizations about how Amenta was even more horrible than I had thought. Is there any way we could convince the clean castes to increase the amount of red work near proportionate to the efficiency gains from mechanization, possibly by founding more or larger cities or something? Or declare that maintaining garbage collection robots is a red job? I sent the greens studying me a lot of research on agricultural science, but I don't know how quickly that will result in higher population permitted.

And he's going to search up a complete list of red jobs, just to see if there's anything he can plausibly claim advanced societies need a lot of.

The population will go up if the carrying capacity does, but on a delay - it's not spring now, and even when it is spring, which will be in a few months in the south, they don't want to have all the population boom happen immediately. You might be able to convince them that it's worth having more frequent garbage pickups and faster response times for corpsetaking and plumbing emergencies but it would seem kind of weird for you to have an opinion on that, honestly. They will do absolutely everything they can to avoid reds having power over anything to do with robotics.

The essential question issue as I see it, is - if the number of red child credits per capita drops by half, and the population growth doubles, reds who currently exist are no worse off. How do we make the new technology reduce the demand for reds by less than the rise in population increases it? Can you think of desired technologies that would allow for larger houses, or produce more garbage as a side effect? I suppose we could buy time if I spread some new housing-integrated technologies that everyone wanted to use that required laying new sewage pipes for the new houses, but that would not buy is the twenty years or more that it might take to get FTL.

New pipes won't do it anyway, purples lay it when it's new and nobody's used it yet. Do any of your new energy techniques have any byproducts we don't have yet that might want very elaborate handling?

... He really likes Conspecific.

I'm sure I can find one.

Let's see, what are the options... antimatter power has no horrifying byproducts that he knows of, synthetic plagues are banned on most worlds... there are some horrifically toxic byproducts from manufacturing some of the alloys, he discovers on lookup, but most of those aren't that important...

I don't suppose you've split the atom yet?

We have not. There's actually a conspiracy theory about it.

That is extremely convenient. What's the theory say?

Physicists coordinating to prevent it from being invented for some reason, but I'm not a physicist.

That is extremely reasonable of the physicists! Nuclear weapons are horrifying large-scale destructive weapons that pollute massive areas for generations. However, by this point we have extremely safe, easy-to-build fusion reactors that can provide power at an extremely low cost -

(Which are actually almost completely obsolete, but there's no need for the Amentans to know that.)

- and the only side effect is that it produces polluted waste, for which we do, in fact, have extremely complicated safe disposal procedures. Thank you, physics, for this assistance in saving the day. Is there any reason I shouldn't inform the alien research project that I already spammed their planet with the relevant schematics?

I'm not sure what kind of working relationship with them you have but it doesn't sound like the kind of presentation that would necessarily lead to anyone deciding reds were necessary for the disposal without you telling them.

No, I'm unfortunately not trained for any of this. I can say that the waste is a dangerous pollutant even by human standards, and that it harms anyone near it unless extreme precautions are taken? I'm worried they'd just default to 'have robots do it', long-term, but I think that's generally true.

Yeah. I'm Doetaran and also unemployed so I don't think there's any way I can reasonably sign on to the alien-handling project to get a different angle on what they're thinking.

What I currently wonder is if I can convince them 'if you cut red credits, they'll riot and that will look bad, but if you vastly bolster growth, you can dwindle them down to nothing while you convert them to cyborgs without anything going wrong, here's a convenient way to do that'. Be honest and open about my goals if not the motives behind my goals, or if that would just cause more problems.

They don't like knuckling under to red riot pressure. People keep having clever ideas to get robots programs past them. I don't know if any of them have gotten very far like that before you came along but if they haven't it's not for lack of people willing to go "I have a clever idea that lets us kill all the reds instead of not doing that".

Ugh.

Turning our attention to the second problem - a decentralized system for the gene-samples. I expect I could design an artificial womb that could be manufactured, then purchased and stored in-house; there exist Imai* designs that fit that pattern and anything would need to be adapted to Amenta. Do you think there would be legislation blocking reds from using this, and if so, do you think they could get around them?

They don't actually bother to legislate in a lot of anti-red stuff. If there aren't strong clear instructions in favor of making sure reds can access something - red hair dye, food, birth control - then anybody involved in sending it to them can just not do that for whatever reason. Is gene sample storage the same technology as the artificial womb somehow?

If I design a two-purpose device, it is.

I want to understand this, because it is a new fact: If a red gets money, from doing that red's job, and wishes to buy legally obtainable items on the internet, that red cannot have those items delivered to that red's doorstep? There is no company that has decided it is willing to follow through on its contracts if reds are willing to pay more money for delivery?

There might be some companies that will do that but I think most of them will either a) reject red addresses as inputs or b) not do that automatically, but the delivery service will notice they're heading for a red neighborhood and simply not enter the red neighborhood, and the red will have no recourse when the package doesn't arrive if they don't get a refund, which they probably won't. Reds with sympathetic clean acquaintances can get things through them, a lot of red possessions are reclaimed trash, and the very basics are ordered by red shopkeepers through dedicated services.

But... but...

Nau pauses, deletes the message.

Among humans, it is essentially a truism that if producing and shipping something costs enough less than its value to a purchaser to pay enough money to make a career out of, someone, somewhere, will be willing to do it. I would think that there would be enough of them that 'selling items to reds' would be such a service. The company could - to sketch one simple model - have red drivers in completely sealed-off compartments that interact with nothing else, drop a crate by claw onto the back of the truck, then let the red driver deliver it. Via this message you could have goods sold to reds for very little cost. Something is broken in my understanding - of Amentans, of reds, of how recently the internet was invented - if no one is doing that.

You might not be factoring in the cost of interacting with reds or of being known to interact with reds? Or you might be overestimating reds' willingness to trust that sort of thing. If someone offered this service they'd have to convince reds to make purchases they could not possibly get refunded if it was a scam, and convince a driver to come to a non-standard location where they provide a non-essential service. They get killed a lot even doing their normal essential jobs. Maybe once someone did this for real and no reds bought anything because the last fifty times their money just got stolen.

Nau wants to run this company, make a billion tap, and show them, show them all.

You start by offering people store credit, then you - oh, never mind.

I will for the moment treat the premise that no such company exists as factually correct, while looking for options to sponsor anyone sane and reasonable who tries to implement found it. (I don't suppose you have purple friends who might be interested?) I presume it would not be conceivable to get the dedicated services that do serve red stores to expand to including artificial womb technology, which suggests that we would need to locate any that existed in preexisting hospitals, which means we would need to secure them against interference from their own medical personnel.

He pauses.

I still think that the gene samples getting lost would not be a problem - I can make integrated scanners that reduce the complexity of the sampling to a literal wave of the hand - but I expect that medical murder would be. The first solution I have come up with to solve it would be to build a camera into the design I offer them, tell them that not manufacturing it would require redesigning the whole machine, engineer it so that it is so, and then it would be harder to claim accident. What is the state of medicine for reds, anyway?