Oh, quite, I am merely positing that a change of attitude towards work might be in order at some point, possibly within our children or grandchildren’s lifetimes.
I’m looking at the world, and in the the last 3 decades I have noticed trends and they raise endless maybes and “what if” questions in my mind*. I don’t want to stray offtopic but to expand on something I mentionned earlier:
-Food output has exceeded global needs significantly and the trend will likely continue.
-Transportation and communication networks are steadily growing and improving.
The idea is that humanity’s body is getting enough food and that the nerves are growing thicker, longer and are becoming more sensitive. With internet, ubiquitous video and camera phones and a culture of sharing and gossipping. It becomes harder everyday to get away with something that irks many.
Troublesome acts become more disruptive and annoying the more finely-tuned humanity’s body becomes. We want everyone to get the best possible education so we may discover more gems like einsteins, leipzigs and Avicennas. We want everyone to be as physically and mentally “healthy” as can be so that they don’t hurt others through bad decisions and so they stay productive. We want everybody to be happy so that morale, enthusiasm and efficiency will be as high as is achievable.
A utopic goal to be sure, but the transcendental goal of mankind is to create a specie-centric utopia. No reason to stop after agriculture, roads, cars and computers.
As manual labor and physically hard work lose importance, a major goal to harness our greatest asset, brainpower, will be to make work as challenging and fun as each person needs it to be. I am entirely clueless as if and how it’ll happen, but here is a very entertaining video that talks about harnessing human brainpower that I heartily recommend. Skip to 1min30s to bypass the boring intro.
Luis Von Ahn on google video
*I am endlessly surprised that other, much smarter, better educated and eloquent members and guests keep indulging what I sometimes think of as “mental diarrhea”.