The Jetsons - A Destructive dream?
Had an interesting thought occur to me on the way out here.
There's another, long-term reason for the current mess the global economy is in. I'm not just referring to the latest problems (over the past year or so) caused by bad banking, disguised risk, and so forth. Those are merely symptoms. A far larger symptom is the near-demise of the American manufacturing sector.
"Are there attitudes or ideas deep-rooted in the social consciousness that are causing these problems, or making them worse?" I asked myself.
The answer I came up with is "yes, there are."
Specifically, I'm looking at the idea of the convenient, automated society.
I remembered a comment that was made a couple of years back at ACen - "Artificial intelligence is the biggest fraud in the computer industry. It's been ten years away for the past thirty years."
Actually, it goes further back than that. Even in the sixties and fifties, one of the near-universal tropes in sci-fi writing (and TV) was that computers, machines,and drones would one day be able to take care of everything, leaving humans with no need to work and neigh-unlimited leisure time. This shows up in The Jetsons (George doesn't seem to actually do anything at work, and Jane has Rosie to do everything around the house for her), in Star Trek (in TOS and TNG, did we ever see anyone on a Federation planet - one of the core worlds - actually working? Or farming? Granted, yes we did in DS9, at least in one episode, but he was seen as a nutcase, and there was the whole spiel with the first-run EMHs in Voyager...except that they're not human and I'll get to more of that in a second....), and in much of the SF written in that era (I'm thinking specifically of Retief and The Hub, in neither of which do we ever see people working at a traditional trade or farming). Even dystopic writing doesn't actually show too much in the way of what you or I would consider a "trade skill" - Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 both show information work, while in Brave New World, nobody with an actual consciousness (that is, an "A-Type") ever has to work. The computers and the lowly D-Types do all the work.
This continues up to the present day, although a few shows have (mercifully) gotten their acts together in this regard - Sheridan's father (Babylon 5) is a farmer - and this is not unusual for the Earthers, as well as a few episodes ("By Any Means Necessary", "A View From The Gallery", the whole arc surrounding the New Grey Council) that focused specifically on those who stand and weld, and although the Goa'uld and A'shen of Stargate SG-1 are far more advanced than we are, they still have actual humans (or Ja'ffa) doing the labor - not automatons.
Worse, the trend of the educational establishment goes in a similar direction. Just have a look at the DSTPs, or any of the 48 other "standardized exams" that have come into existance over the past decade under No Child Goes Untested. I'll tell you what, I've been proctoring those exams for two years (there's always a number of teachers conveniently ill during test week), and I've never seen a single external application ("skill") question on them. There's no "cooking" or "carving" or "shop" or "sewing" (or "art" or "music") section on the DSTP, that's for sure! And because they're not on the examinations, those classes ("home ec", "shop", "art") all get shafted....I know that my Jr. High school doesn't even offer home ec or shop anymore, judging from the reactions I get from my students.
Even before the stampede towards standardized testing, we saw the same thing: my high school offered no real "skill" courses. The expectation was apparently that everyone attending the school would be going on to college or into some sort of clerical/information field, I guess. PolyTech, the nearest thing we had to a vocational school in the area, was notoriously understaffed, underfunded, and generally a poor alternative (it's improved since then, I'm told). I understand the situation was similar elsewhere. I also know for a fact that while I learned the basics of sewing back in middle school and Jr. High (this was after learning them from my mother, but I digress), I learned jack shit about welding, soldering, blow-torching, or riveting in school. I picked all those skills up on the fly.... Greg (my best friend growing up) didn't learn his mechanical skills at school - he couldn't. He learned them from his dad, who was a USAF engineer.
Worse, this has been going on for long enough that it's become accepted as The Way Things Are, and it is rather difficult for schools to buck the trend. The overwhelming pressure on students in high school is still to go to college. The schools are trying to encourage workforce destinations too, but it's relatively easy to tell that most of the teachers and administrators don't really have a clue about preparing students for a nonclerical job. Worse, the "success rate" of a school is still bound up in how many of its students go on to college - and even when they got to college, look at how many of them have no freaking clue what they want to do, and couldn't define any sort of career goal if they tried. I mean, one of, if not the most important measure that U.S. News and World Report uses to define a "good" school is, you guessed it, how many students go on to Master's or Ph.D programs.
The problem here is that we have allowed this dream of a society where nobody has to do any physical labor to seep deep enough into our collective social consciousness that we automatically define ourselves in terms of that society.......which we are far short of. We have nowhere near the degree of automation necessary to create a society where nobody does physical labour unless they want to, yet we keep churning out high school and college graduates (and dropouts, for that matter) who cannot function except in such a society. And the damage is rapidly becoming apparent: TN is the only state that has taken federal stimulus money and used it to put people back to work in construction and infrastructure jobs, in spite of the fact that the highways (among other things) are crumbling. The amount of resistance within Congress to the reactivation of the old TVA or WPA is immense ("socialism" is the nicest thing I've heard it called...). Money for retraining workers to take on "skill"-based jobs? Nonexistant. Our industries are almost completely imploded - steelworking is dead, automobiles are crippled, most manufacturing is gone, moved overseas - at least partly due to a labour shortage that has sent the cost of hiring anyone to work the machines or tools through the roof. Why do you think the cost of a new house remains so high (and was driven up so high during the bubble)? Even at the unemployment office, the focus is on getting the unemployed clerical-type work, and little money is to be had for training them in mechanical fields.
We are rapidly approaching, if not have already long passed, the point where we could not sustain outselves industrially if we were required to (for example, if China were to embargo us for, oh, just about anything. Or if Taiwan were struck by Meteor).
And yet we churn out more information-age students, and fewer mechanics. Not to mention plumbers, welders, carpenters, shipbuilders, highway pavers, and so on.
I suppose that maybe we expect to reach the Jetsons Nirvana at the end of the slump, or something?
Even if we ever do reach this utopia of having our every wish taken care of by automation, there is a rather sticky moral question to address as well.
In order for all production - food, machines, machines to make the machines, cars, houses, roads, and so forth - to be totally automated and never require human input, the machines doing the production, as well as the controlling machines, would need to be intelligent - well above the Critical IQ level. Otherwise they'd be incapable of making the necessary decisions. Not to mention that farming is still bound up a great deal in instinct and intuition. Medicine is too.
If we have machines we constructed doing all of our work, and those machines are above the Critical IQ level, are we not practicing slavery? Can we ethically allow a society to be built on the backs of a group of sentient, thinking entities, even if those entities were designed for that role?
I'm amused to listen to this particular piece of music as I write this, given what Hahn Nova was....
There's another, long-term reason for the current mess the global economy is in. I'm not just referring to the latest problems (over the past year or so) caused by bad banking, disguised risk, and so forth. Those are merely symptoms. A far larger symptom is the near-demise of the American manufacturing sector.
"Are there attitudes or ideas deep-rooted in the social consciousness that are causing these problems, or making them worse?" I asked myself.
The answer I came up with is "yes, there are."
Specifically, I'm looking at the idea of the convenient, automated society.
I remembered a comment that was made a couple of years back at ACen - "Artificial intelligence is the biggest fraud in the computer industry. It's been ten years away for the past thirty years."
Actually, it goes further back than that. Even in the sixties and fifties, one of the near-universal tropes in sci-fi writing (and TV) was that computers, machines,and drones would one day be able to take care of everything, leaving humans with no need to work and neigh-unlimited leisure time. This shows up in The Jetsons (George doesn't seem to actually do anything at work, and Jane has Rosie to do everything around the house for her), in Star Trek (in TOS and TNG, did we ever see anyone on a Federation planet - one of the core worlds - actually working? Or farming? Granted, yes we did in DS9, at least in one episode, but he was seen as a nutcase, and there was the whole spiel with the first-run EMHs in Voyager...except that they're not human and I'll get to more of that in a second....), and in much of the SF written in that era (I'm thinking specifically of Retief and The Hub, in neither of which do we ever see people working at a traditional trade or farming). Even dystopic writing doesn't actually show too much in the way of what you or I would consider a "trade skill" - Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 both show information work, while in Brave New World, nobody with an actual consciousness (that is, an "A-Type") ever has to work. The computers and the lowly D-Types do all the work.
This continues up to the present day, although a few shows have (mercifully) gotten their acts together in this regard - Sheridan's father (Babylon 5) is a farmer - and this is not unusual for the Earthers, as well as a few episodes ("By Any Means Necessary", "A View From The Gallery", the whole arc surrounding the New Grey Council) that focused specifically on those who stand and weld, and although the Goa'uld and A'shen of Stargate SG-1 are far more advanced than we are, they still have actual humans (or Ja'ffa) doing the labor - not automatons.
Worse, the trend of the educational establishment goes in a similar direction. Just have a look at the DSTPs, or any of the 48 other "standardized exams" that have come into existance over the past decade under No Child Goes Untested. I'll tell you what, I've been proctoring those exams for two years (there's always a number of teachers conveniently ill during test week), and I've never seen a single external application ("skill") question on them. There's no "cooking" or "carving" or "shop" or "sewing" (or "art" or "music") section on the DSTP, that's for sure! And because they're not on the examinations, those classes ("home ec", "shop", "art") all get shafted....I know that my Jr. High school doesn't even offer home ec or shop anymore, judging from the reactions I get from my students.
Even before the stampede towards standardized testing, we saw the same thing: my high school offered no real "skill" courses. The expectation was apparently that everyone attending the school would be going on to college or into some sort of clerical/information field, I guess. PolyTech, the nearest thing we had to a vocational school in the area, was notoriously understaffed, underfunded, and generally a poor alternative (it's improved since then, I'm told). I understand the situation was similar elsewhere. I also know for a fact that while I learned the basics of sewing back in middle school and Jr. High (this was after learning them from my mother, but I digress), I learned jack shit about welding, soldering, blow-torching, or riveting in school. I picked all those skills up on the fly.... Greg (my best friend growing up) didn't learn his mechanical skills at school - he couldn't. He learned them from his dad, who was a USAF engineer.
Worse, this has been going on for long enough that it's become accepted as The Way Things Are, and it is rather difficult for schools to buck the trend. The overwhelming pressure on students in high school is still to go to college. The schools are trying to encourage workforce destinations too, but it's relatively easy to tell that most of the teachers and administrators don't really have a clue about preparing students for a nonclerical job. Worse, the "success rate" of a school is still bound up in how many of its students go on to college - and even when they got to college, look at how many of them have no freaking clue what they want to do, and couldn't define any sort of career goal if they tried. I mean, one of, if not the most important measure that U.S. News and World Report uses to define a "good" school is, you guessed it, how many students go on to Master's or Ph.D programs.
The problem here is that we have allowed this dream of a society where nobody has to do any physical labor to seep deep enough into our collective social consciousness that we automatically define ourselves in terms of that society.......which we are far short of. We have nowhere near the degree of automation necessary to create a society where nobody does physical labour unless they want to, yet we keep churning out high school and college graduates (and dropouts, for that matter) who cannot function except in such a society. And the damage is rapidly becoming apparent: TN is the only state that has taken federal stimulus money and used it to put people back to work in construction and infrastructure jobs, in spite of the fact that the highways (among other things) are crumbling. The amount of resistance within Congress to the reactivation of the old TVA or WPA is immense ("socialism" is the nicest thing I've heard it called...). Money for retraining workers to take on "skill"-based jobs? Nonexistant. Our industries are almost completely imploded - steelworking is dead, automobiles are crippled, most manufacturing is gone, moved overseas - at least partly due to a labour shortage that has sent the cost of hiring anyone to work the machines or tools through the roof. Why do you think the cost of a new house remains so high (and was driven up so high during the bubble)? Even at the unemployment office, the focus is on getting the unemployed clerical-type work, and little money is to be had for training them in mechanical fields.
We are rapidly approaching, if not have already long passed, the point where we could not sustain outselves industrially if we were required to (for example, if China were to embargo us for, oh, just about anything. Or if Taiwan were struck by Meteor).
And yet we churn out more information-age students, and fewer mechanics. Not to mention plumbers, welders, carpenters, shipbuilders, highway pavers, and so on.
I suppose that maybe we expect to reach the Jetsons Nirvana at the end of the slump, or something?
Even if we ever do reach this utopia of having our every wish taken care of by automation, there is a rather sticky moral question to address as well.
In order for all production - food, machines, machines to make the machines, cars, houses, roads, and so forth - to be totally automated and never require human input, the machines doing the production, as well as the controlling machines, would need to be intelligent - well above the Critical IQ level. Otherwise they'd be incapable of making the necessary decisions. Not to mention that farming is still bound up a great deal in instinct and intuition. Medicine is too.
If we have machines we constructed doing all of our work, and those machines are above the Critical IQ level, are we not practicing slavery? Can we ethically allow a society to be built on the backs of a group of sentient, thinking entities, even if those entities were designed for that role?
I'm amused to listen to this particular piece of music as I write this, given what Hahn Nova was....