Re: [Futurework] The world of work

[Ed Weick]

Another point well made.    What you are not saying however is that all of these "solutions" are "top down"  mass production solutions and no one seems to be willing to take that on.    We either get New Age Communes of Henry Ford and the Taylor solutions and I don't mean Kit Taylor.    There has to be something better.    But will we discover it or just keep going over the same ground like a cul de sac?   Ray   Perhaps we're not there yet.  We may still have another evolultionary stage or two to go.  Several things I've read suggest that the human mind took some kind of quantum leap sixty or seventy thousand years ago bringing several previously separate intelligences together to form the mind as it exists now.  For example, Thomas Homer-Dixon puts it as follows on p. 203 of The Ingenuity Gap: Little changed when Homo sapiens sapiens first arrived, about 100,000 years ago. The new hominids made some bone tools and engaged in slightly more ritualized burial, but otherwise they behaved similarly to their predecessors and to their contemporaries, the Neanderthals. But around 60,000 years ago something startling happened: the archaeological record shows an explosion of art, ritual, and complex tool-making. This, Steven Mithen contends, is the first evidence of full communication among the various intelligences within the hominid mind. The vehicle for that mind, the hominid brain, hadn’t become any bigger—its last burst of growth had concluded tens of thousands of years before. But suddenly we see the lineaments of modem human thought—its creativity, its flexibility; and its extraordinary ingenuity. "A cognitive fluidity arose within the mind," he argues, "reflecting new connections rather than new processing power. And consequently this mental transformation occurred with no increase in brain size." When I first read that, I thought of the original Eden, of God touching Adam's hand as on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.   The "intelligences" that were brought together were, according to Homer-Dixon's source, technical intelligence, social intelligence, natural history intelligence and linguistic intelligence.  I really don't understand how these could be separated from each other, but that is the argument.   Perhaps, to get out of our cul de sac, we need another combinatorial leap, something that might, for example, bring together reason and compassion so that bombing Iraq would not be possible because we would have a very deep empathetic and rational understanding of the true nature of being bombed.  In the Sistine Chapel, God touches Adam's left hand with his right.  Perhaps next time round he should reach out to Adam's right with his left.   Speculatively yours, Ed   Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax     (613)  728 9382