Is Technology Good or Bad?
We have been saying that technology is just a tool, and it depends on the way you use it, whether it will be good or bad. However, this is a naive, overly simplistic viewpoint continued by our lack of logic and reasoning taught in schools.
F-c-book could have been great at bringing people and families together. If it was just a communication platform that upheld communication. But, it was not, it was designed to control people, it was built to manipulate emotions. Neither of these are good. And, if you want to use f-c-book for communication, you have to block out the adverts and the manipulation. Like, you have to go to a specific friend's page to make sure you are seeing most of their content. The algorithm can make you believe that a friend has gone away, that they no longer like you. They have literally dropped off your timeline.
So, we really cannot say that technology can be used for good or bad, when it was set up for evil.
In the future, a similar technology will sweep the world. Everyone will have a "Wall Server". It is a little server that feeds all of your stories all of your photos. The big difference is that you control your data, and you control who you share it with. And then, we will have interfaces that go and collect all of our friend's shared info, and construct a page that may look just like f-c-book. You in charge of your info, you in charge of what you see, you in charge of any selection criteria. Like, if you do not like repeat posts, you can tell your compy to hide them when you have seen them recently. Or to limit Aunt May's word salad posts to a few, and not all of them.
Just a small change can change whether something is for good or ill. However, that small change is usually at the bottom of the decision tree. Not the top. Not the level where most consumers can do anything about it.
The Luddites
When the factory owners changed to automated looms, the Luddites through their shoes into the gears, sabot-aging the machines (sabot is a style of shoe)
After this, the Luddites have gone down in history as being against progress and innovation. But, they were against having their lives and careers destroyed.
The factory owners believe that they are separate from the community supporting them. And THIS, is what makes innovation bad. The factory owners believed they could just get rid of the workers, because, after all, they were the ones that hired them in the first place. And, if they owners were honest about things, they knew that they were screwing over a bunch of people and the town they were a part of.
This is a place where capitalism fails. The factory owners believe they are separate from the town, however, so much support is built around the factory. Diners, delis, cleaning supply companies, manufacturing supply places… Things that came into being because there was a factory that had workers there. And, things that, after the factory leaves, slowly dry up and blow away.
If there wasn't the propaganda and mindset that automation was good, the factory owner who just laid off a lot of people, would find it difficult to continue living… in that town.
The town that supports the factory really needs to be included in the analysis.
Automation is a disease
Automation is a bad word, describing a bad setup that is used to destroy people. However, many media groups have tried to spin this word as "good". (But, but, i do not feel we have a word, similar to automation, that is good. Maybe Maker-verse)
The corporations are planning to get rid of the employees. Which are, to them, an expense, and a headache, that should be gotten rid of. The corporate leaders really think this way. That if they could just get rid of them, they would be creating corporation-utopia.
They are even going down the same logic trail with AI.
But don't believe that lie, there are soooo many people hired by corporations to just move paper around. Every govern-cement employee is just there to receive and file paper, and their counterpart in industry is just their to send them paper. I could have completely automated this in the 90s. Gotten rid of all those jobs without affect any production. However, these people are there to provide jobs, to keep people working to get money to buy the cheap crap the corporations make.
The word "automation" is one that says, be afraid of losing your job, you replaceable cog. It has nothing to do with making our lives better or easier.
The Future - Communities and Making things
In the future we will be living in small communities, with our closest friends. And each of these small communities will have a thing they make to trade with other communities.
This turns everything above, upside down. If the community owns the factory, then everything the factory does to improve efficiency, to minimize pollution, and increase production is beneficial to the community.
Instead of being a way that the corporation is getting rid of pesky employees and separating itself from the community/town.
If the community-business includes robots, CNC, 3D printing… than the community gets that much time back. Every improvement gives the community more free time. If AI or expert systems is incorporated all of those gains go to the community. Further, if the community prefers doing things by hand instead, they can. There are no corporate overlords who could demand anything.
What is weird is that when you have a community that is mostly self sufficient, and you get two communities building the same sort of thing, you get something besides competition. You may get friendly competition where both groups try to make their product better and better (KNOWING that when they improve, their "competition" will use that improvement). So, it might be better to say cooperation, than competition. But competition is the correct word, but its meaning applies to building up, instead of tearing down.
The future will see a lot of distributed manufacturing. First starting in garages, building, assembling needed things locally. And then it will just be something that each shop/maintenance facility is capable of doing, or it becomes a business that the community decides they will do.
Open source will be the name of the game, or just the starting point for cooperation in the future. And every improvement will help out the world.
When we change the basis of an innovation to be good and helpful to the world, instead of good for a corporation/bad for the world, we will finally start to see those promised benefits the capitalist pundits went on and on about during every piece that got rid of workers.
This will be our future, and this is one of the big reason corporations crumble to dust. Given an alternative, most people will not work for any corporation. And, even if they have enough people to keep it running, people, given an option, will not buy from these corporations. Good riddance to evil.
I am looking forward to manufacturing all the goods i need. Like refrigerators and free energy devices.