Nice read. I'm reminded of an article from over a decade ago by an Israeli academic who was inquiring about the future of the "useless class," or people who had no role in productive labor. He argued that the average person in the future must be handled by offering simple sustenance and creating satisfaction through drugs and video games (https://www.cnn.com/2014/09/17/opinion/opinion-tomorrow-transformed-harari/index.html). I think that gets to the core of your argument here: the managerial class looks at human satisfaction as an obstacle to be solved (through technical means specifically) instead of the actual goal of working to improve the world. Which does leave a question: what *is* the goal of making industry more productive and efficient, if not human happiness?
Yes, dystopian novelists have been treading along these lines for decades.
I might put it this way: There are two complimentary phases of what we may, for lack of a better term, call “machine thinking.” The first is an outward motion: society, culture, and human beings themselves begin to resemble machines—and begin to be described in mechanical terms. The second is an inward motion: if we are all essentially machines in the first place, then it would be a decisive improvement if we replaced ourselves with actual machines—only better.
The second of these seems to be where we are now. We long ago learned to see the economy as a giant machine. Now the question is how we can replace its human components, with all their inefficiencies, with better, more capable, machines.
Nice read. I'm reminded of an article from over a decade ago by an Israeli academic who was inquiring about the future of the "useless class," or people who had no role in productive labor. He argued that the average person in the future must be handled by offering simple sustenance and creating satisfaction through drugs and video games (https://www.cnn.com/2014/09/17/opinion/opinion-tomorrow-transformed-harari/index.html). I think that gets to the core of your argument here: the managerial class looks at human satisfaction as an obstacle to be solved (through technical means specifically) instead of the actual goal of working to improve the world. Which does leave a question: what *is* the goal of making industry more productive and efficient, if not human happiness?
Yes, ever wonder why Bezos wants UBI and legal weed?
Yes, dystopian novelists have been treading along these lines for decades.
I might put it this way: There are two complimentary phases of what we may, for lack of a better term, call “machine thinking.” The first is an outward motion: society, culture, and human beings themselves begin to resemble machines—and begin to be described in mechanical terms. The second is an inward motion: if we are all essentially machines in the first place, then it would be a decisive improvement if we replaced ourselves with actual machines—only better.
The second of these seems to be where we are now. We long ago learned to see the economy as a giant machine. Now the question is how we can replace its human components, with all their inefficiencies, with better, more capable, machines.