Technology and us

[Skids]

Technology grows at an exponential rate. A large part of technology is automation. With the increase in automation in factories, and many other workplaces, the most obvious example being car manufacturers, how are we to combat unemployment? With the amount of jobs falling and the population increasing, soon the only thing we'll be able to do is sit on our backsides twiddling our thumbs. (No matter how much we evolve we will always have thumbs. How else will we text and play Playstation games?). Or will it be a time of enjoyment where we can do what we want when we want?
I remember a commercial for IBM being run a while ago that suggest that in the future we won't need to go to work to be able to work, and that we won't need to travel to go to international meetings. Those times are upon us and it is becoming more and more widespread. Shouldn't we be encouraging people to get up and do stuff rather than not leaving the domicile? Isn't it bad enough that we have internet shopping? Isn't the current epidemic of over-weight people due that fact that we have become far less active? Is this the way we want to go?
Where are we heading as a race?

PS There still isn't a suitable topic category for this stuff.

[5029]

You could try in the Internet and Technology section?

[Calvesy]

Hey, Skids

Wow you're well into the existential angst of the zeitgeist! Progress and freedom have always met with inertia. No one can predict the future of the human condition, yet it the responsibility of all of us to do the right things to move this experiment forward. The industrial revolution began when we learned how to bang rocks together to make sharp edges, and you're guess of where it'll all end up is as good as anyone's, even the most twisted imaginations of the darkest sci-fi authors!

My personal belief is that we are at the dawn of a new era of religious warfare, as iron age philosophies struggle to convince the liberally enlightened that their way is right.

[slimfandango]

Money money money money money.
Tell me about the industrial era when money didn't matter? Where consumers didn't matter. Did you hear about the Hi tec company that makes groovy gadgets and gives them away for free? It doesn't exist. You need a market. This market is made up of people. With disposable income. That they get from jobs. If all the jobs are replaced then the new robots serve for nothing.
Mankind will kill itself waayyy before we reach this stage.
Anyway, work isn't just about the ends of work (production), it's more about the means: man self-actualizes by work. I think winning 'Millionaire' would really suck.

[Fitzburger]

Its the 21 century and where is my spaceship, my rocket backpack, and my ray gun? Where are the women in silver overalls with pointy bras and big hair?

We were all told that garbage and its not going to happen.

Since the 1950's most folk have been inadvertantly living in the presence of computer technology in it's many forms and all it does is replace some people who then have to do something else, while still dependant on the byproducts of computers. People I knew who hated computers now find that they can't work without having to use a computing device of some sort, so at the end of the day they don't really make less work, just a different way of doing things.

Recently Intel reached the limit with the CPU. A 4 GHZ processor had to be channeled, ie; made to behave like 2 less powerful microchips because 4 GHZ is beyond the limit of conductivity in the chip given the nature of particle physics. In 5 - 10 years time all the PC's in the world will have to operate in a different way.

Computers are already being forced to adapt to the limits of nature.