Comments on: The Future of Work – An Appropriate Labour Day Topic

By: Niccolo5

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 23:13:30 +0000

Len says: “I am of the opinion that harnessing greed for good may prove to be the best way for us to solve so many of our problems.”

You have that proven “greed harness” all ready to go? What is your plausible “improvement” over the several more obvious “greed harness” arguments Plato advanced in his “Republic?” In the some 2,400 years since Plato, and Jesus didn’t have much to add, no winning “harness” argument has yet taken effect. Hominids enjoy harnesses even less than draft animals. But, I’ll gladly give my full support and agreement to the notion that hominid greed needs to be harnessed, not exterminated.

The main problem seems to be that greedy foxes don’t make good henhouse guards. Throughout the developed world the greedy foxes are setting the standards, making the rules, and guarding the henhouses. Only imposition of extreme coercion will persuade foxes to submit to harnesses. That’s where intervention by advanced beings would have to come in. Without the hypothetical intervention we are heading pell-mell toward Borg world.

]]>

By: lenrosen4

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:20:45 +0000

In reply to Niccolo5.

“Barring intervention by immortal advanced beings” suggests that humanity cannot alter behaviour sufficiently to overcome greed and apply good. I am of the opinion that harnessing greed for good may prove to be the best way for us to solve so many of our problems.

]]>

By: Niccolo5

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:25:04 +0000

It all comes down to whether technology and science will serve individual profit and privilege or the collective welfare. In past ages the available technology was so primitive that many human skills and much physical labor were required to produce individual profit and privilege. But the “age of intelligent machines” negates much of the human input traditionally needed to turn an individual profit. All the major governments are now heavily influenced or controlled by oligarchs that individually profit from the production and distribution of the goods of life. No one with significant economic or political power is much concerned about humanity as a whole. No one is going to manage how the transformation of humanity will develop. It will just grow like Topsy with the devil seizing the hindmost.

Barring intervention by immortal advanced beings, only the hominid lust to maximize individual profits will shape and drive the process. So humanity is destined for prompt extinction as an independent species with free moral agency. The privileged oligarchs of this generation are maintaining their status as princes and kings by enslaving future generations of human kind and dooming them to organic robot status.

]]>