Our need for truly healthy involvement in that which sustains us

Working just to get money is just as empty as sitting around and having nothing to do. A meaningful occupation is not disconnected work simply to afford the output of our great dream deluded sh_t machine.

I mention this again as I have just read a quite good review of "Advantageous," which is now available on Netflix. There are, however, other popular culture expressions related to this larger issue of "work" and who will end up doing it for us.

The TV show "Humans," the movies "Ex Machina," "Vice," and "The Machine," to just name a few. All of these look at the question of what are these machines for, as well as how will we end up treating them. In the TV show a mother begins to wonder if she is being replaced, and where you see that most manual work is being done by them. And the more we make slaves of them the more contempt we begin to have, even as they take away jobs. And then, of course, there's the fear that they will become self aware, and so a great deal more than just very efficient "reasoning engines," able to do our so called "work" for us.

There is a glaring lack of imagination here concerning just what work ought to be be, and what we risk in thinking we can have a consumer society where all of the things, which we won't really appreciate, are made for us.

The problem here is that we've never really taken the time, as a society, to just stop with business as usual and consider what might be a better way to engage not only each other, but what making and maintaining a balanced life could be. Of what having a federation of communities where we are the managers and the maintainers, and that what we have as needed, or desired, material items, would come from a healthy mix of technology, as well as our own personal, hands on, involvement. This is important, as I've said more than once, because woe be to those who become too separated from that which sustains them. An axiom applicable, as we've already seen, for both practical reasons as well a emotional and psychological ones.

There is also a glaring lack of appreciation for someting else going on here. The fact that much of the inevitability, which so many hold for the coming of machines that will supplant us cognitively, comes directly from their perceived monetary value; the competitive edge they will engender in so many ways and thus, the profits from whomever holds the patents. Change the economic operating model, however, and eliminate money? Would the insensitive to solve all of the tremendous engineering challenges still remain? I, for one, don't thinks so.

Anyways... Just some more things to consider when the topic of "robots" comes up.