From: John Heritage (xebec@home.com)
Date: Thu Jul 09 1998 - 17:50:41 MDT
First off, I wanted to say I'm completely new to this mailing list, and
also new to finding people outside of my small realm of 2-3 people for
discussing these topics. So if I fail any etiquettes that are required for
discussions here, please let me know immediately, Thanks..
Now that that is out of the question : ->
Does anybody here believe there will be a Star Trek future where all we
will have to do is spend time improving ourselves through whatever means
necessary? ie: The idealistic society where all of our food needs,
clothing needs, etc etc are taken care of by educated/intelligent machines
& computers?. If a society like this IS to exist, it certainly won't be
any time soon, but....
Is there any facets of these technologies that we can develop in the next
10 or 20 years?. I'd like to wake up in the morning and have some
intelligent computer synthesize food or clothes.. or atleast do something
to produce the equivalent (ie : have it go out and work or do something
equivalent for money, that once the machine is created, NO intervention is
required). This obviously requires generic synthesis of parts, or
self-replication / repair technology.
I would like to see the possibilities of life that can be achieved if we
did not have to structure our entire life around working until we are
physically less capable (age 65), and when our body has already undergone
several weakenings of lifetime aging. There are many things I'd like to
accomplish or even just "play with", that are not possible unless I either
possess a "large sum of money", or "unlimited free time". I theorize we as
humans advance a lot because we have a lot of people doing specific things
due to unique circumstances causing their upbringing/background and their
future life-line-to-be.. but there are so many things that we could
possibly accomplish if we did not have the burden of an economy to worry
about when trying to do/learn new things...
I don't really believe there will be a star trek like future, atleast not
any time soon, because there are too many people who are content with just
working the rest of their lives, and never really accomplishing anything,
and then there are those who are content with "controlling" people for the
rest of their lives, and not really doing too much to improve themselves.
Let's say there are two classes of people in a given society : "The Worker
Drones", and the "Motivated People".. By these classes I suggest the
'Worker Drones' are people who through whatever reasons in their beginnings
of their life, are stuck on the "here and now", stuck on the "short term
gains" of establishing a house, family, retirement, etc.. and establishing
constant income, working their entire lives, etc etc. Living by all of
societies rules. Then the "Motivated People" would be the few people who
see beyond everything. They might be like you and me - people who realize
to accomplish OUR goals, we DO have to play by society's rules and we have
to do certain things in a certain fashion (which is futile - the doctrine
that you are not allowed to make certain decisions until certain points in
life is a horrible thing...), BUT we realize that there IS more to life
than just passing the time. We'd like to be able to escape our
limitations. We'd like to be free in some way, or we'd like to improve
everyone as a whole in some way that is not judgemental.
This is a hard discussion for me to start - because I had the beginnings
of this discussion about 2 months ago around 2 o'clock in the morning, and
I've lost a lot of specific details of the conversation.. but the concept
is there...
Anyway, the "worker drones" are prepared to live whatever the "Standard"
or "Standard plus" lifestyle is (standard being what is "normal income or
lower income", and "standard plus" being someone who is well off through
whatever means and in whatever ways)... the "Motivated people" are the
ones who really shape our society through new concepts, ideas, thoughts,
technologies, and occurances of any kind...
I wanted to also theorize here that with each advance the motivated people
create or establish, there is always an equivalent, but slightly different
advance that the worker drone receives. ie: the industrial revolution -
the motivated people created machines.. eventually we had a working class
society that regardless of what effect the working conditions had on them,
they now had more things to do or use or have in their lifetime. They
eventually took it for granted that they could have things like cars, home
appliances, etc etc.. instead of having just hand-fabricated everything.
Machine made clothes (ala more than a few nice pairs of clothes now!, wow
:-) ), etc etc... Another advance example would be computers. The
motivated people created computers to solve whatever problems or create
whatever possibilities. The net effect, so far, for the worker drone has
been games & entertainment. More options for how to make money / live a
life, etc etc.. but the idea of the worker drone is still the same -
sustain themselves on society's "minimum standards", like "Everyone else"..
and the motivated people are still striving to improve life and society
through whatever means...
The question I have is - what advances can we make to change humanity "for
the better", and is there any way of upgrading the worker drone into a
self-thinker and motivated spirit?. I have many examples of friends,
associates, and coworkers, who, even though they are intelligent, learn
well, do well, etc etc.. they're just content on having the "normal things
in life". When I discuss or bring up certain advanced topics, they think
"that's really cool",, but they do not attempt to analyze whatever
structure might be necessary to create or engage this "coolness"...
blah blah blah..
John Heritage
[The Human Mind Is Capable Of Solving The Problem Of The Human Mind]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:19 MST