It's interesting to me how often people confuse the idea of being supported by government systems with the idea that those people are "lazy" or not being productive or creative in any way.
This is the height of the stupidity of such views. Ultimately we WANT to build a society where more people are able to survive without having to work if indeed that is what they want. This situation benefits all humanity as it ALWAYS has.
It is freedom FROM work that got us out of the daily subsistence survival JOB when we learned how to harness the patterns we saw in the environment with regard to locations for water and other sources of natural resource and flora and fauna we needed to survival.
That freedom FROM work got us to think about writing literature, induced us to build surpluses of our now readily gathered natural resources, created the first builders and engineers and craftsmen.
As our ancient ancestors all over the world became good at these things they discovered metal as a resource and learned to work it and used it to more efficiently mine the earth of plants and grain...which gave them even more time to think about ways to store and measure grain, mathematics was born.....writing and trade spread it all over the world.
The ease with which people could survive led to the emergence of art and philosophy and more invention.
So to sit back in technological hubris and with the assumption that there is something wrong with allowing people (any people) to have the choice of not working is not only completely wrong it is ABSURD.
It is freedom FROM work earned at hard edge of labor by our ancestors, built up into our technology and stored in the words of our languages and writing systems.... that has us living the way we do today in a significantly advanced society, mostly free from the grinding dangers of the environment...free of the daily act of survival in that environment and able IF WE WISH to create, to invent, to write, to pursue our ambitions or aims or to sleep our lives away.....THAT IS THE GOAL.
My driving aim having created the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm which takes the ability to enable people to free themselves from the NEED to work by leveraging technology, is to get people to understand this....that we have to inverse this paradigm of thought that presumes freedom from work is some how bad or backward or "lazy".
Nonsense...absolute and complete nonsense, it is the polar opposite...it is how we got here as a species and if we want to improve, it is the direction we MUST take all society otherwise with my brothers and sisters in technology rapidly moving toward replacing available sources of human work with automated or autonomous workers (my career for the last 16 years) we people will find ourselves in regimes of discord as displaced labor events accelerate. So leveraging technology to create workforce emancipation by converting systems to AOW driven systems, by building autonomous delivery and transportation systems (drones, robocars, robotrucks), by building autonomous manufacturing robots and facilities for mining and extraction fueled by electricity gathered at oceans of solar panels.
They've already been happening for the last 30 years and arguably since the industrial revolution but the return has over come the loss in terms of enabled freedoms for larger groups of humans (this is why the USG can now afford to support so many people on disability or other problems...again THIS IS GOOD....THIS IS THE GOAL.)
To think otherwise is to miss entirely the previous story of how we got here...which is not supposition it is 100% fact.
The relentless drive towards better ways to build hard drives, processors and networks is reducing the cost to massive compute power every year. Companies like Amazon, Apple, IBM, Salesforce.com, SAP, Microsoft and others are building "cloud" infrastructures that other companies are leveraging to make the task of building startups today significantly reduced compared to the past....today I can launch a startup entirely from my bedroom without need to buy a physical server, without need to touch a load balancer, a router a switch...I don't need to hold a cd or a dvd to install my software on any of the machines I use....I can procure new machines as I need them and deallocate them as I don't need them and I can have them accessible across multiple geographic regions.
To build such a system just 10 years ago would have cost tens of thousands of dollars of physical procurement costs for hardware and hands on need to build it all together in some physical environment. The costs are all gone and I am much "lazier" with the work that would otherwise required dozens of people being done by one.
That has benefited us by allowing services built on such IAAS (infrastructures as a service) to extract value extremely efficiently...and then provide those services at low cost to consumers all over the world.
The race to zero is clear....in technology and it is clear that we can leverage technology to allow a race to zero in all areas of human existence...at least it was to me a dozen years ago and inspired why I started building AgilEntity and later inventing AOW. It's also why I've set forward to think about how technology used specifically can bring us to a world where humanity is coddled by a self healing infrastructure (SHI).
Getting people all people to a point where they can be lazy if they wish and thus be free to pursue an unbounded path in terms of creative expression is what we want.
May we get to zero with all deliberate speed.
Links:
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/search?q=aOW
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/search?q=SHI
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