After a lifetime trying to make sense of things my late mathematician
friend
finally concluded that "life is a crapshoot".
Arthur
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell
Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2013 4:39 PM
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before an
Intoxicating Dawn?
How about in the Arts where everyone has a degree and 2% work at full time
jobs. Pure, raw luck.
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete
Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2013 2:23 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before an
Intoxicating Dawn?
Maybe, but not divided along the lines anyone expects. It may be neither
the
rich nor the smart that win, nor the poor nor the dumb that lose.
It may hinge on who is most ready to cooperate and collaborate, or it may
just bubble in random chaotic clusters.
-Pete
On Sat, 9 Mar 2013, michael gurstein wrote:
Or, and this is the fundamental flaw of the Ted-oids is it
both--utopia for some and dystopia for the rest.
M
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur
Cordell
Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2013 2:37 AM
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: [Futurework] Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before an
Intoxicating Dawn?
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Kurtz
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2013 8:45 PM
Subject: [Ottawadissenters] Are We Standing at the End of Times or
Before an Intoxicating Dawn?
<http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York Times
_____
March 8, 2013
Are We Standing at the End of Times or Before an Intoxicating Dawn?
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/anand_gi
ridhar
adas/index.html>
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA - This foolish, callous world of ours is en
route to hell. Or this is the best the world has ever been.
One of the stranger features of our time is the jousting and mingling
of these two rhetorics. You hear them so often that you can forget how
extreme and contradictory they are.
Europe and the United States as we know them - and, ergo, civilization
itself - are toast. The ecosystem is falling apart. Your texting
children will grow up illiterate. China's sky will soon be rotating
among 50 shades of black. The middle class? Finished.
Oh, but: We live in glorious new times in which an illiterate,
malnourished African child can text-message her way to democracy;
upload her version of the "Harlem Shake" to YouTube on that smartphone
she hopefully owns and become a viral star; and perhaps even avail of
that 3-D printer in her refugee camp and finally make those toys her
parents never could buy her.
Each of these rhetorics must be taken with a truckload of salt. But it
is true that this is simultaneously a time of real fecundity and real
withering, of astonishing innovation and unbelievable breakdown, of
great gains that so often fail to make ordinary lives less grinding
and
bleak.
To spend a few days ricocheting between these rhetorics, attend the
annual TED conference - it stands for technology, entertainment and
design - which this year served up a heady stew of claims that the
world either is going to the dogs or is awesome squared.
It began, aptly enough, with a debate between two men about whether
human progress was over or perhaps just getting started. The scary
thing was, both made a compelling case.
Robert J. Gordon, an economist, depressed everyone with a "progress is
over"
sermon. His bottom line: The kinds of things we innovate and celebrate
today, like apps and thinner phones, cannot compete with previous
generations of innovations for their capacity to improve human living:
the discovery of electric lights, for instance, or of refrigeration,
elevators, cars and washing machines. Thus, genuine progress is
leveling off and, with it, growth.
Erik Brynjolfsson quickly marched onstage to inform us that Mr. Gordon
was all wrong. The next wave of inventions will make the last waves
seem childish. It's a new dawn in which we can measure almost
anything, in which ideas can be shared for free, in which people
around the world can self-organize and solve problems without the help
of
big institutions.
Progress!
If you came suspecting that this technology thing was ruining the
world, there was much fodder for you. A technologist named Danny
Hillis warned that the very smart Internet was never designed to power
very dumb things like your light bulbs and your thermostats - and that
using it for more and more such things exposes us all to the risk of
catastrophic system meltdowns.
Others argued that technology was privileging headwork over other
labor and would leave all but the most brilliant behind. That the new
corporate-built, technology-greased cities we are creating will lack
soul. That we're all going to be badly hacked unless we wake up. That
technology once seemed poised to take us all on regular moon trips,
and instead all we got was Facebook.
And then, just as you were about to get sad, you would hear that 3-D
printing is going to revolutionize the revolution, turning all of us
into makers. That blind people can now get shoes installed with GPS
and a haptic feedback system, so that their shoes can navigate them.
That there is a new way to create credit scores
<http://topics.nytimes.com/your-money/credit/credit-scores/index.html?
inline =nyt-classifier> for the world's millions of unbanked people.
That robots, rather than displacing workers, will soon work alongside
them, turning humans into robot trainers. That paper posters can
somehow be turned into electronic touch screens. That someone has
figured out how to make cheap, Ikea-like kits for the assembly of
whole houses. That we're at the outset of a new solar energy
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/solar-
energy /index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> boom. That underground
fission will make solar seem like amateur hour.
Sometimes, the utopians at TED grow so removed from the doom crowd
that they propose solutions to problems that aren't really problems,
like how the Internet is presently confined to human beings.
"We should not restrict this network to one species," Vinton G. Cerf,
one of the pioneers of the Internet, said in introducing a new
initiative - the Interspecies Internet.
And so it went. An age of "technological unemployment" awaits, but -
Bono informed us - extreme poverty could soon be behind us. The music
business as we know it could end, but so could global health
pandemics. Corrupt money is strangling U.S. politics, but never fear:
We can bypass the U.S. government, raise virtuous money and incent
states to make reforms with private, rather than public, cash.
What makes this time of ours so peculiar is that both of these visions
contain truth. It's hard to think of a comparable period in history in
which the rhetoric of end times so effortlessly danced with the
rhetoric of an intoxicating dawn. So which will it be?
Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly and follow on
Twitter.com/anandwrites <http://www.twitter.com/anandwrites>
<http://up.nytimes.com/?d=0//15&t=6&s=1&ui=26421689&r=http%3a%2f%2fwww
%2enyt
imes%2ecom%2f2013%2f03%2f09%2fworld%2famericas%2f09iht%2dcurrents09%2e
html%3
fref%3dglobal%2dhome&u=www%2enytimes%2ecom%2f2013%2f03%2f09%2fworld%2f
americ
as%2f09iht%2dcurrents09%2ehtml%3fref%3dglobal%2dhome%26pagewanted%3dpr
int>
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