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heron61:
The 40-hour work-week sucks - and I should be glad I'm working only that and that no more can be demanded of me without compensation in time-and-a-half or equivalent money. I remember reading a utopian "what if" by Isaac Asimov once where he envisioned that the increasing use of technology to do work (manufacturing, food production, service industries being the three major ones) would mean that humans would eventually have to do almost no work at all, and we would turn into a leisure- and arts-based society.
This is all wonderful and good if it does happen (I would certainly like to see it - maybe then the aliens would initiate open contact since we'd finally grown up, lol), but it seems to me to be a chance balanced on a razor's edge. Right now increasing use of technology to do work seems to be putting people into poverty or at least financial struggle, because everything else isn't structured to support the transition to leisure. Also it seems to depend on the basic goodness of people, kind of like libertarianism, and we know how that is. :-/
As you say [said in this other post], I think it does kind of boil down to advancement or collapse... but I think the way things are currently structured, collapse is almost inevitable. There has to be a more fundamental consciousness-type change...
heron61:The 40-hour work-week sucks - and I should be glad I'm working only that and that no more can be demanded of me without compensation in time-and-a-half or equivalent money. I remember reading a utopian "what if" by Isaac Asimov once where he envisioned that the increasing use of technology to do work (manufacturing, food production, service industries being the three major ones) would mean that humans would eventually have to do almost no work at all, and we would turn into a leisure- and arts-based society.
This is all wonderful and good if it does happen (I would certainly like to see it - maybe then the aliens would initiate open contact since we'd finally grown up, lol), but it seems to me to be a chance balanced on a razor's edge. Right now increasing use of technology to do work seems to be putting people into poverty or at least financial struggle, because everything else isn't structured to support the transition to leisure. Also it seems to depend on the basic goodness of people, kind of like libertarianism, and we know how that is. :-/
As you say [said in this other post], I think it does kind of boil down to advancement or collapse... but I think the way things are currently structured, collapse is almost inevitable. There has to be a more fundamental consciousness-type change...
