Well it is far worse (or better depending on who is looking at it), many
of the older trades and crafts-people I've met had an appreciation for
seeing their work as an artform. That would be my robot heaven, working
toward a world where we can all pursue meaning and purposeful work
without the burden of resource scarcity. What would it matter that
someone wants to be a plumber or architect in a day when those positions
are obsolete, if that is pursuing meaning, it would matter little more
than what restaurant someone likes to the next guy. In a world that
valued human contribution it might be a plus, there is a name associated
with the foundation of my home, or certain furniture or I tweaked my
engine to respond exactly the way I like in a curve, finding a way to
shield a planet from gamma radiation, optimizing resource allocations in
complex evolving environments from nanotech on up to transport vessels
for interplanetary mining and settlement, etc..
Back to the present time and scale there is the matter of plotting a
course of innovation by meeting challenges.
Laziness might be a challenge, and frailty, I haven't met many people
who have had to wash clothes in a bathtub complain about the advancement
of the washing machine, or get whimsical about enduring ailments we've
found remedies or therapies for. We seem to be in a transitional stage,
not quite coming to grips with the world we could create. Psychology is
important to survival, nonproductive time as some call it, I eye some of
them as suspect sociopaths. Being motivated can be very rewarding, it is
too bad that out word for meaningfully motivated is "naive". I'm taking
the long way 'round with this.
On 9/19/2012 5:56 PM, archytas wrote:
Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate
the nature of things. Thought experimenting often takes place when the
method of variation is employed in entertaining imaginative
suppositions. They are used for diverse reasons in a variety of areas,
including economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, and physics.
Most often thought experiments are communicated in narrative form,
sometimes through media like a diagram. Thought experiments should be
distinguished from thinking about experiments, from merely imagining
any experiments to be conducted outside the imagination, and from
psychological experiments with thoughts. They should also be
distinguished from counterfactual reasoning in general, as they seem
to require an experimental element.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/
One I like is the notion of robot heaven. It's easy enough to imagine
a time when machines grow our food, build our shelter and do our
work. The interesting stuff comes in thinking what this would mean
for wealth distribution and the nature of society. What work would be
left to do? One can also wonder what place any of our work ethics
would have in such a society. There may be some deconstructive effect
on just what current work ideologies are in place for.
One of the great improvements technology brought to my life is more or
less never having to go into a bank. The only real innovations in
banking are the ATM and electronic banking. This kind of technology
and similar in agriculture and industry fundamentally reduce the
amount of human effort to grow and make what we need. We are in
partial state of robot heaven.
Our ideologies are not up to speed. Real unemployment is massive and
education does little to provide job skills. We are sold life-styles
and products by insane advertising. Job creation seems to be in
perverse areas like financial services or bringing back attended gas-
pumps. With more efficient production we should be able to afford a
bigger social sector and I can't for the life of me understand why we
allow competition through crap wages and conditions.
A great deal of what we pay for could be available more or less free.
Educational content and utility banking are examples - these are areas
that could be ratinalised like agriculture and manufacturing.
Millions of jobs would go. We should be asking why jobs are so
central to out thinking on wealth distribution and how we might
encourage work without the rat race.
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