Using Talents and Technology to build a better world
via the brilliant Dave Pollard
* We need technologies that will enable us to reduce human numbers without suffering or discrimination: Highly-effective, idiot-proof voluntary birth control technologies with few or no side effects; and, if and when voluntary measures prove insufficient, safe fertility-reducing technologies that do not affect other species, that reduce the fecundity of every human female on the planet equally and that, like pollution, can be disseminated without political process. I know this latter idea terrifies many of my readers, and if it were done in any way that involved political intervention of any kind I too would find it unacceptable, but we must face the reality that our planet simply cannot support billions of humans and that we need to find some painless and non-discriminatory, non-political, non-invasive way to get our numbers back to sustainable levels.
* We need technologies that will enable us to produce and deliver both essential and non-essential goods and services while consuming far fewer resources, far less energy, and producing zero waste in the process. Specifically, we need foods that obtain their proteins and nutrients from recycled or inanimate matter, and clothing and building materials that are durable and reusable, recyclable and/or biodegradable.
* We need technologies that will enable people to find the people with whom they can best, and most happily, live, associate, collaborate, innovate, create, imagine, find meaning and companionship, make a living, and establish natural enterprises and intentional communities. We all want and need more attention and more appreciation, and technology can help us find the audience and love that will give us these things.
* We need technologies that will show us (not tell us) how to do things, and let us practice doing those things that are valuable, meaningful, and help make us more self-sufficient. We have far too much useless information and not enough useful, self-esteem building knowledge and capabilities.
* We need technologies that will help us be more generous -- donating our time, skills, and free and unneeded possessions and wealth, to those who can really get benefit from them.
* We need technologies that will enable greater personal self-expression -- the ability to create works of art, music, film etc., using excellent, unlimited 'virtual' resources at no cost, and then to collaborate, to share them, discuss them, improve them, and propagate them.
* We need technologies that will enable the creation and operation of true free markets where profound human needs can be identified and then met by collaborative, self-forming solution teams, in a socially and environmentally responsible way and at the lowest possible cost. And when that cost is still unaffordable for those in need, these technologies need to enable communities to spontaneously coordinate and aggregate the resources necessary to reduce or finance that cost to the point where it is affordable.
So the answer to this article's question is that technology is potentially a great good for our society. All it would take to realize that good is for the bright underemployed minds to get out from under the suffocating organizations that waste their talents and drain their energies, and learn how to create their own businesses, substantial, networked, adequately-resourced, innovative entrepreneurial businesses that can give us not what the rich think they might want, but what we all really need.
* We need technologies that will enable us to reduce human numbers without suffering or discrimination: Highly-effective, idiot-proof voluntary birth control technologies with few or no side effects; and, if and when voluntary measures prove insufficient, safe fertility-reducing technologies that do not affect other species, that reduce the fecundity of every human female on the planet equally and that, like pollution, can be disseminated without political process. I know this latter idea terrifies many of my readers, and if it were done in any way that involved political intervention of any kind I too would find it unacceptable, but we must face the reality that our planet simply cannot support billions of humans and that we need to find some painless and non-discriminatory, non-political, non-invasive way to get our numbers back to sustainable levels.
* We need technologies that will enable us to produce and deliver both essential and non-essential goods and services while consuming far fewer resources, far less energy, and producing zero waste in the process. Specifically, we need foods that obtain their proteins and nutrients from recycled or inanimate matter, and clothing and building materials that are durable and reusable, recyclable and/or biodegradable.
* We need technologies that will enable people to find the people with whom they can best, and most happily, live, associate, collaborate, innovate, create, imagine, find meaning and companionship, make a living, and establish natural enterprises and intentional communities. We all want and need more attention and more appreciation, and technology can help us find the audience and love that will give us these things.
* We need technologies that will show us (not tell us) how to do things, and let us practice doing those things that are valuable, meaningful, and help make us more self-sufficient. We have far too much useless information and not enough useful, self-esteem building knowledge and capabilities.
* We need technologies that will help us be more generous -- donating our time, skills, and free and unneeded possessions and wealth, to those who can really get benefit from them.
* We need technologies that will enable greater personal self-expression -- the ability to create works of art, music, film etc., using excellent, unlimited 'virtual' resources at no cost, and then to collaborate, to share them, discuss them, improve them, and propagate them.
* We need technologies that will enable the creation and operation of true free markets where profound human needs can be identified and then met by collaborative, self-forming solution teams, in a socially and environmentally responsible way and at the lowest possible cost. And when that cost is still unaffordable for those in need, these technologies need to enable communities to spontaneously coordinate and aggregate the resources necessary to reduce or finance that cost to the point where it is affordable.
So the answer to this article's question is that technology is potentially a great good for our society. All it would take to realize that good is for the bright underemployed minds to get out from under the suffocating organizations that waste their talents and drain their energies, and learn how to create their own businesses, substantial, networked, adequately-resourced, innovative entrepreneurial businesses that can give us not what the rich think they might want, but what we all really need.
posted by dave at
5:55 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home