There is not enough work for everyone, and that's fine! "We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." ~ R. Buckminster Fuller Osu!
To an extent I'd agree. We're not living in industrious countries anymore where you can just take a town of people and dump them in front of a bench for 8 hours a day.
For now. But long term I can see technology doing away with a lot of jobs that rely almost solely on labour. Call centres for example: Most of the time they're following a script of some sort and the ability to think logically and rationally isn't all that important. The only jobs I can see where a person will for the forseeable future be definately needed is ones that use the human ability to think. And mma. Robot wars was awesome but mma robots will be less fun.
True... yet, I do not think that Bucky Fuller had the first world in mind with the rest their slaves... I suspect he included everyone. Osu!
If you read Iain Banks' Culture novels, they describe a utopian future where machines undertake all production and humans are almost exclusively engaged in creative or academic pursuits.
This is my big objection to the "worthless" degrees argument. I honestly believe that an educated populace is of intrinsic value to society, regardless of obvious practical application, and I believe that as a society we need people to consider grand themes.
The fact is that Mr. Fuller was simply pointing out a mathematical fact of the Industrial age. Prior to the coming of the Industrial Revolution over 85% of the population of a given country was involved in agrarian pursuits such as farming, herding and ranching. Such pursuits are inherently self-sufficient, leaving the need for commerce to move materials from the haves to the have nots in return for compensation. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution people began to leave their farms and seek employment at better pay for performing a number of tasks needed to satisfy a particular demand. Early-on Henry Ford began to recognize, as did others, that one could produce only so much that would be consumed by a given percentage of the population. In fact he invented the idea of the auto "trade-in" to enhance the market just for this reason. However, a practical society will only spend just so much of their disposible income in either a farming or industrial society. Ergo we must compell those people to spend their money on the things that are made in order to support an industrial culture of vast numbers of workers. Ergo we enhance the idea of advertising, marketing, and conspicuous consumption. BUT sooner or later people get enough toys and they begin to back off. How do we get them to participate in a system they have no further interest in? You make them wage slaves. Fix it such that things cost so much that the huge numbers of people who are no longer on the farm now MUST work and make a wage--either to pay debts, buy shelter and food or protect their off-spring. Where am I going with this? My point is that the late Buckminster Fuller saw the artificiality of our modern system. It is mathematically impossible to find enough productive jobs for the non-agrarian population to satisfy the relatively small amount of actual needs of the rest of the population. And with the continual use of automation, the number of jobs is shrinking all the time. BTW: Regarding the "degrees issue" I can safely report that Educational Commerce---- I don't pretend that it is truly Education---- is highly skilled at churning out worthless educational programs and degrees, all in the name of "the more you learn the more you earn". This is the educational counterpart to the ever-inflated employment requirements of potential employers who use the need to have ever more exotic degrees and titles as an excuse for not hiring a given individual over another. Best Wishes, Bruce
I concur - but there needs to be an end in mind for the said themes to have application. My own degree in and of itself had little to no intrinsic value, but it gave me skills that were transferable to reality. If someone wants to think, think and think some more they shoudl either pay for it or their relatives should - that way they fulfil thier intellectual need without burdening anyone else save their own family
Why? A purpose need not have an end nor an application... it needs to be fulfilled. I think the idea of "payday" is what Bucky Fuller meant by "do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living"... In fact, his idea is on a voluntary basis... those that want to think will spontaneously do so. Osu!
If you have a definitive aim in mind then it's not blue sky thinking. Those neutrino experiments which may have just turn a century of physics on its head - what end did they have in mind?
The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual. --- R. Buckminster Fuller
I'll join in on this: I'm twenty years old, I'm educated to a college level. I'm not incredibly smart, I don't pretend to be. I have accepted now that I was lied to as a child, that if I study and stuff I could be whatever I wanted. Now that I'm looking for a job, I realised how hard it is to find work. I can't get work, I've had a few interviews, and I got a job as a canvasser... I quit after the first day. I just couldn't do it, I don't have a problem with mind numbing work, stacking shelves and the like, but it was counter-productive to society to be harassing people. And mass amounts of rejection just was not for me. It just looked like a waste of my life, I really want to become a full-time paintball Marshall (I am qualified to do that). It is a job I do love, it's great fun, and everyone is happy. There's an indoor place opening up near me, they are gonna be looking for full-timestaff, wish me luck!
I wonder sometimes how productive that "you can be anything you want to be line" actually is. Lovely thing to say to a kid but I think all of us have realised by now it just isn't true and finding a career you actually want to spend your life doing is stupidly hard. One of the brightsides to wanting a military career: They always want people
Nodding your head doesn't row the boat - Irish Proverb You can't eat thoughts, not matter how hard you think about them.