> There are a few ideas that are at play. One is the march of progress seeking to automate everything. The rationale of automation is to improve productivity. But what happens when everything is automatic? I don't see a corollary being played out at the moment.
I don't know! :-D
I don't know what society would look like from a purely technological point of view. From a spiritualist point of view, though, it could either go very well or very badly. When everything is automated, would people have enough time and space to really start asking the really big questions? Or would it accelerate and intensify existential anguish?
> There are a small number of people reaping the benefits, and huge swathes of the population being marginalised and disenfranchised as a result.
Yeah. Arguably, this has already happened.
> The second idea that interests me is this idea of very high technology. It is built upon layer after layer of very clever tech year after year that I wonder how long it would take to start again from scratch if some disaster rendered a large part of one of these layers unusable.
The stuff of sci-fi :-D Among them, alt-history novels (what happens when someone drops into a lower-tech era; you'd have to start from 0 ... literally, 0, as in Arabic numerals).
Open Source Ecology is trying to preserve some of this tech base. I find their aims awesome, though I am not sure how effective it is.
The flip side are things being spoken from well outside the techno-sphere, (for example, shamans and mystics) It is the perspective that the further evolution of human consciousness will, at some point, no longer require a technology or artifacts. Technology seen as the last crutch. The collapse of a high-technic civilization then sets the stage for a removal of that crutch, and humans learn to stand with two feet (so to speak).
I don't know! :-D
I don't know what society would look like from a purely technological point of view. From a spiritualist point of view, though, it could either go very well or very badly. When everything is automated, would people have enough time and space to really start asking the really big questions? Or would it accelerate and intensify existential anguish?
> There are a small number of people reaping the benefits, and huge swathes of the population being marginalised and disenfranchised as a result.
Yeah. Arguably, this has already happened.
> The second idea that interests me is this idea of very high technology. It is built upon layer after layer of very clever tech year after year that I wonder how long it would take to start again from scratch if some disaster rendered a large part of one of these layers unusable.
The stuff of sci-fi :-D Among them, alt-history novels (what happens when someone drops into a lower-tech era; you'd have to start from 0 ... literally, 0, as in Arabic numerals).
Open Source Ecology is trying to preserve some of this tech base. I find their aims awesome, though I am not sure how effective it is.
The flip side are things being spoken from well outside the techno-sphere, (for example, shamans and mystics) It is the perspective that the further evolution of human consciousness will, at some point, no longer require a technology or artifacts. Technology seen as the last crutch. The collapse of a high-technic civilization then sets the stage for a removal of that crutch, and humans learn to stand with two feet (so to speak).