DAK, I caught the tail end of the industrial revolution and while you might think that "good hard work" to do is a good thing, I deliberately sat on some sheet steel one lunch-time to eat my sandwiches and told myself never to forget the guys working there in the metal bashing and cutting factory and how life was/is for them.
I have done lots of "good hard work" of various types. While some manual jobs have been enjoyable, there are some which are not enjoyable. People don't do more of them just for fun.
You are right on the basic idea that we are bodies with brains and the balance has to be right. But industrial revolution "good hard work" wasn't all that great for everyone. People can still choose to do it if they wish. It doesn't pay much compared with geeking on a keyboard, but people are free to do manual "good hard work" if they wish. They choose not to because they like the better pay rate and what they can get.
It's all choice. People are not mindless automatons [though I'm happy to argue the deterministic position that people don't have free will in the most fundamental sense].
I knew I'd be out of the steel cutting, welding and painting place and knew that most of those guys had no way out. You can think they had a good life, but I prefer mine having escaped. When cyberspace has replaced our brains, as the industrial revolution replaced our muscles, we'll be free at last with machines doing the leg work and brain work. We'll be at the apex of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Anyway, even now, people can use their bodies all they like. They don't have to sit on the couch gawking at tv while shoveling another kg of food down the hatch.
Mad Magazine decades ago did a cartoon about the proliferation of cars and how Americans would evolve to have legs and arms as vestigial organs, being shaped like fat bowling pins.
One look at what is sold in supermarkets in the USA [and here] is enough to explain a lot of things. If all the "food" things in a supermarket were mixed together in a big container, there would be a LOT of soft-drinks, sugar, white flour, fat and low-nutrient products, combined together with a lot of ethanol. But even that isn't an accurate description as some people are quite particular and buy the nutritious stuff and some buy the junk food. So some people are quite healthy and others are eating an appalling diet.
The Matrix has got nothing to do with the process. Other than some DNA selection to give offspring high intelligence, there's not much that can be done to improve our limited wet chemistry brain power. Sure, we can have cochlear implants and retina scans to help data input, but we'll still just be people with 1 kg brains, albeit with a lot more smarts.
Even with Einstein's brainpower, we'll still just be people with infinitesimal memory and speed of recall compared with Google, let alone what'll come along. Not to mention "thinking", reading, and so on.
The industrial revolution was fueled by property rights, brainpower, population and civilized processes. Found resources were not the central issue.
Maybe I'm a dreamer, but there really are CDMA networks around the world and there really is a Globalstar system spraying the joys of CDMA through you. There are quite a few things which I've dreamed and they became 3D reality. Ideas always precede reality. No ideas = nothing happens.
You are welcome to spend your days grunting away in manual labour in Pol Pot's or Mao's agricultural great leaps forward. I'll take the cyberspace revolution, mod cons and freedom from the joys of survivalist "LOTS OF GOOD HARD WORK TO DO".
Mqurice |
