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Whither Asimov?
Jun. 27th, 2012 09:22 pmRead these two articles on the same day, and thought they played off each other in an interesting way:
1. From Tiger Beatdown, "We cannot have it all because we no longer have dreams," expressing the author's irritation with a piece at The Atlantic that has been re-posted by seemingly a quarter of the women I know, and which similarly irritates me*, for reasons that also include . . .
2. "In Praise of Leisure," at The Chronicle of Higher Education, about the ahistoricism of the idea that one will and should always want more - should want to advance at work, should want to buy a second home, should upgrade one's food and furniture - and the way that has changed our approach to our free time, including how little free time we have.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg television has been running a week-long series about whether robots are going to take our jobs. My understanding was always that the robots were supposed to take my jobs, so that instead I could run around doing as I like without things falling apart. I'm not sure how we arrived at the current system, where instead of all of us becoming aristocrats we seem to have mostly become other people's employees and to feel bad about ourselves because we are not famous. Even the vaunted 1% mostly work too much. Whither the robots?
* I have very little patience for the idea that the problems confronted by feminism are chiefly the result of feminism and not patriarchy. I am also baffled by any person in the world who thinks, about any subject, that they were guaranteed to succeed.
1. From Tiger Beatdown, "We cannot have it all because we no longer have dreams," expressing the author's irritation with a piece at The Atlantic that has been re-posted by seemingly a quarter of the women I know, and which similarly irritates me*, for reasons that also include . . .
2. "In Praise of Leisure," at The Chronicle of Higher Education, about the ahistoricism of the idea that one will and should always want more - should want to advance at work, should want to buy a second home, should upgrade one's food and furniture - and the way that has changed our approach to our free time, including how little free time we have.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg television has been running a week-long series about whether robots are going to take our jobs. My understanding was always that the robots were supposed to take my jobs, so that instead I could run around doing as I like without things falling apart. I'm not sure how we arrived at the current system, where instead of all of us becoming aristocrats we seem to have mostly become other people's employees and to feel bad about ourselves because we are not famous. Even the vaunted 1% mostly work too much. Whither the robots?
* I have very little patience for the idea that the problems confronted by feminism are chiefly the result of feminism and not patriarchy. I am also baffled by any person in the world who thinks, about any subject, that they were guaranteed to succeed.
