january 04, 2009 06:10pm – in Korea
I haven't even re-read this yet. I already know I'm not going to like some things (mostly at the beginning) when I do.
Is it just me or is civilization arriving at a state of near perfection, and yet no one acknowledges it?
As we learn more and more about generating power efficiently, and about how to get work done automatically, people tend to get alarmed (and rightly so) that people will lose their livelihoods, or that humanity is becoming too reliant on machines and automation.
But step back. Using the example of an ancient civilization, you might say they had the same goal. The Spartans didn't want to to farm, or waste time on maintenance, and so by some stretch of the imagination, you might think that by enslaving an entire neighboring society called the Helots they were just trying to automate things. They would certainly have thought of the Helots as something other than human, undeserving of freedom, and therefore something like a robot. The Helots did all the labor the Spartans didn't enjoy, and the Spartans spent their time studying, and training as fighters. Not what I would have chosen, given all that free time, but it got them off.
Like the Helots, a peasant (or slave) class has been a reality for thousands of years. Over time we (humans) are beginning to prefer nicer ideas about all humans being equal, without concern for race. But it seems that without regard for a person's race, the rich use their money and power to make things just so that they devote their time to leisure, and most humans have to work every day of their life, doing something they hate if they want to eat.
And history has progressed marking the progress of the powerful. Reading history books means reading about who owned what, how they got it (generally by war). And it's all because having access to more resources means things become easier, and if you can get that resource, more people in your society will have more time for leisure.
It's hard to see it, but I think things are getting easier. In Hans Rosling's Ted Talks he makes a convincing case (using very clear statistics, and an earnest and humane delivery) that the globalized world, though there is still clearly poverty and war, is feeling the benefits of technology and civilization. It seems, from looking at his graphs, that violent death is being reduced on the whole. Violence is reported on the news constantly, sure, and it's unquestionably gruesome and unnecessary, but the numbers say people are living longer, and increasingly, not dying from violence and starvation.
And it will be easy for a person with a conservative outlook on life to read this and say "well, sure. That's because society is fine, and people everywhere should just hop on board." And I don't agree with that at all. I think the infrastructure of society is still terrible, and oppressive, and based around the leisure of the rich and powerful. And I think were society is going will result in a huge increase in leisure time for the peasant classes all over the world. But only if we look at the state of our species from a long way away, and really try to understand what our lives are supposed to be like.
I tried Googling (in quotes) "People are happiest when," and it overwhelmingly produces two results: people are happy when their loved ones live around them, and people are happy when they do work that is not beneath their dignity, especially work that is creative (Noam Chomsky also famously said something to that effect). You'll also see some cynical remarks, but people on the internet are surprisingly consistent about the secret of happiness.
So I'll get to my point. People, it seems to me, want to live in small, familiar communities, and spend their time doing something they like. So the idea of life, then, is to make it so that we can spend as much time as possible doing something we enjoy, and spend that time with our family and friends.
This seems painfully obvious. But the realities of humanity's past contribute to assumptions about culture that might soon be proven false.
Almost all cultures mercilessly hammer home the idea that hard, bruising work is the daily duty of a virtuous person (Protestants, for example, or Koreans) and for thousands of years of human development, that was certainly true. An ethical person did his part to contribute to the acquisition of food, the building of shelter, and the maintenance of the infrastructure of the community. An unethical person just has a slave do it.
And it seems like inevitably, we scatter ourselves around the world, or all over our cities. We move to be close to work (or choose some awful work just to be in a convenient location), rather than concern ourselves with something that seems frivolous if I say it: living next door to our friends.
I'll try not to sound hysterical, but in the next hundred years it seems like we're edging in on the technologies we need to make food production automatic, or nearly automatic. Maybe not The Singularity, but little things like Toyota's solar powered car project, and Honda's Asimo, despite their pie-in-the-sky, 1938 World's Fair vibe, are talked about with a straight face. Whether these are clear examples of the kind of efficiency our future has in store remains to be seen.
On the other hand, less hysterical, more practical technological marvels to consider, thanks to simple ingenuity. There are huge shifts going on. As our world's agricultural system reels from the decline of cheap fossil fuels, it is beginning to consider efficiency in a much more direct way, like this example where the interaction of multiple species on the same farm result in less work for the farmers themselves. Enough ideas like this, shared worldwide result in efficiency of a different kind.
I'm saying that in the next couple of centuries, through a combination of technology, and the free exchange of ideas, we as a species, might figure out a way to eliminate labor, or at least wind up with everyone working a few hours a week.
There are still clashes of ideologies to consider. Technology certainly won't be what finally brings us world peace. Most likely the opposite is the case. And sorting out our notions of what makes a community or a society if the nuts and bolts of the economy suddenly shifted like I'm suggesting it might won't be nearly as simple as I might seem to be saying.
But I must know, am I crazy to think that if we allow ourselves to reconsider what we as a species want out of life, it's possible that the concept of work might someday become outdated?