Arthur,
At 06:49 18/07/2010 -0400, you wrote:
Just one correction. Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World
Wide Web. He deserves to be recognized as some sort great humanas he did
this and seemed to have sought no monetary outcome such as trying to
patent or copyright anything.
True enough. However, it's to be wondered whether he had any idea of just
how his innovation would be developed. Initially it was just a useful mode
of communication for scientific results. Einstein's ideas about mass/energy
conversion, and A. C. Clarke's ideas about geostationary satellites are
similar ideas that led on to the most enormous consequences. But laurels
are certainly due to scientists like Salk, who eschewed patenting his polio
vaccine even though he had a shrewd idea of the billions he could have
earned if it had been commercialized.
Keith
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Arthur
From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2010 3:16 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; Arthur Cordell
Subject: Re: [Futurework] timesizing not downsizing
Arthur,
"Timesizing" is not the answer to job sharing because the higher the
income, prestige, power, perks or intrinsic interest of a particular job
or profession the more that its practitioners will control the entry of
too many others and resist the knowledge-sharing that's required.
This is why, in an age of increasing automation and specializations, a new
globalized meta-class is building on the separation of the professional
middle-classes of the last two centuries and gradually becoming a
permanency. In an age when a steadily increasing proportion of young
people face a lifetime of make-work or no-work, I cannot see what the
answer may be, given the present institutional set-up -- educational,
institutional, political.
Unless, of course, the youngsters themselves start to produce the answer.
The vast majority of innovations throughout history occur to young people
(while their frontal lobes are still developing with millions of new
neurons) and, what with their mobile phones, there never has been such a
generation that is so well-connected with their peers as now, or as wary
of the protective world of the adults.
A simple idea of Alan Turing (conceived when he was 24) and subsequent
work in parental garages by other youngsters has produced the personal
computer. A simple idea of Tim Berners-Lee (conceived when he was 34) has
produced the Internet. What with nucleic acids being able to be bought off
the shelf, and a sufficiency of garages and youngsters, one never knows
what wonderful new DNA sequences may be contrived in the years to come
which will blow the present economy right off course -- and perhaps
produce job-sharing and interesting pursuits for everybody this time.
Keith
. At 20:09 17/07/2010 -0400, you wrote:
<http://www.timesizing.com/2ts.htm>http://www.timesizing.com/2ts.htm
The standard response to technological innovation today is downsizing,
rationalized by the myth that "technology creates more jobs than it
destroys." The myth is belied by companies' repeated success in getting
taxbreaks by threatening to take their jobs elsewhere, by the huge
increase in <http://www.timesizing.com/1mkwkegs.htm>makework in both
public and private sectors, and by mounting numbers of people on welfare,
<http://www.timesizing.com/3disab.htm>disability,
<http://www.timesizing.com/1homless.htm>homelessness,
<http://www.timesizing.com/2jailvu.htm>prison, forced
<http://www.timesizing.com/1retire.htm>retirement and forced
"self-employment" with no clients. Globally, downsizing has turned the
goal of competitiveness into a race to the bottom and darkened the world's
economic and ecological outlook. But the good news is that very few
changes in approach can stop the downturn and get everything spiralling
UPward again.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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