Last night I experimented with starting a video cast on YouTube. My first guest was Gray Scott a futurist who created Serious Wonder and was an executive director of a new documentary The Future of Work and Death.
The video cast is generally structured as a mirror of the documentary with the first half focused on the future of work (possibilities of automation/abundance), and the second half focused on the future of death (possibilities of life extension and philosophy of immortality).
C
Thanks steve. I'm excited to start producing some online content again. I hope you enjoyed the whole episode :-)
The part where he talks about the 3d printing clothes and circuit boards etc. is a little under developed. Otherwise he sounds very grounded and knowledgeable and it's interesting. I say it's underdeveloped because he says that we can look forward to a world with no work, and that we should embrace it, but the things he mentions about the future are all work. It's work to print your own clothes, or design an outfit. It's work to decide what to farm. Sure, it's less work, but still, what if I just don't want to do it. Will there be some sort of agreed upon valued object that we can exchange for other goods and services? How do we attain more of this to make it so that we can outsource our food and clothing needs to others in general? Ad nauseum. I like the idea of having my virtual person that people are having conversations, but then I die and they can still talk to me. And my virtual avatar just keeps on going until no one visits it because all the people that would be interested forget about me. But their virtual avatars would still come because no one visits them either. So our avatars visit each other.
I agree. I wish I could have gotten more concrete examples of how new technologies could be used to generate practical steps towards empowered individuation and self-organized communities. This is still super blurry to me and always seems to miss the dimension of the need for new large-scale political forms.The part where he talks about the 3d printing clothes and circuit boards etc. is a little under developed.
I bring every version of the future to a simple test: The Seaplane Test. In the current system, there is a way for me to own this seaplane. It's expensive ($595,000) due to supply and demand, and I will have to work for a very long time to actually own it. It's something that I want for myself because of intrinsic reasons, and there is a path, although difficult, where at the end that plane lies. I want to fly to Alaska and land on a lake one day. Then drive up the gravel dock to park it by my inaccessible cabin where I can be alone or with the people I love and nature. In the new system, can I get this? I think not. Can I buy the lake and the materials to build a second home for the cabin to exist? I think not as well. The reason this is important, is that there are lots of 'seaplanes' and not just what you think about as frivolous things. Even in this discussion, you have him giving the example of how food that I grow myself is 'not going to taste like McDonald's hamburger'. So in effect, we are presented with the new system (which I understand may well be unavoidable), where food is dictated by what is available to grow yourself. Or the homes you print will be dictated by a set amount of material which is available. And so who decides how much concrete you get, or what seeds are available, or that I can't buy a seaplane. Those people have the power in this case. Those people now have wealth in authority over others. And you better believe they will be corrupt.