In other words, the problem is not technology, but capitalism.

[ 18 June 2004: Message edited by: Mike Keenan ]

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Originally posted by nonesuch:
We - baby boomers, if you like - read science fiction when we were very young. We expected great things: cheap energy, an easier life, better health, longer life, less drudgery, more leisure time, equality of the sexes (since it doesn't take superior muscle-mass to push a button or solve a problem) even, maybe, a levelling of the class structure.
What happened?
What's gone wrong with technology?

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The technology we have is mostly geared toward military uses, that's what's wrong. And we are still waiting for private sector pharamceuticals to come up with something as life saving as Banting's(Canadian) insulin or Salk and Sabin's polio vaccine, both discovered decades ago and funded with shoestring budgets. Spending on R&D sux in Canada.

Much of the commercial technology available to consumers today was developed by governmental departments employing a few hundred engineers and scientists. Everything from computer tech to lasers, satellite, metallurgical to pharmaceutical advances, to fibre optics and internet packet switching protocols were initiatives of taxpayer funded projects like American organizations ARPA, DARPA and other military projects designed to keep up with the Soviets after their launch of Sputnik in 1957. We changed our math and science school curriculum's to emphasize practical physics and math to be create practical scientists oriented towars certain areas of science and technology...military purposes.

Canada produced one of the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world, the Avro Arrow, and it was promptly shutdown and scuttled away to the States along with the talent that produced it. It could have meant decades of prosperous governmental contracts and research and development for Canada, but the conservative party led by Diefenbaker at the time, made sure it didn't happen.

The American federally funded initiatives went on to produce Saturn V rocket technology, F-15 fighter planes, integrated circuit "chip" technology, packet switched protocols, TCP/IP etc, computer graphics tech, parallel computing, redundant array of inexpensive devices(RAID), reduced instruction set computing, GPS, ceramics advancements, phased array radar, human genome-project-NIH, hepatitis and other vaccines, cancer drugs like Taxol...In fact, of the cancer drugs produced by big pharmaceuticals between 1955 and 1992 in the States, more than 90% of them were federally funded discoveries by research scientists at the NIH or in academia. Stem cells were proven to be extractable from monkeys by a Wisconsin? UNiversity professor whose idea was later picked up for about a million dollar by a California based biotechnology company named ... I forgot. It's late..

off!

[ 18 June 2004: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Rand McNally:
I would guess that anyone who has been in a office enviroment for more than a decade will have seen a huge growth in paper consumption.

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Even those of use who have not been in an office environment for that long have seen how much paper is gone through.

I work in a small office - 12 fulltime employees, I think. And we go through paper like you wouldn't believe. Most of our paper goes into confidential scrap, which is then shredded and recycled. But other paper isn't recycled, which drives me up the wall.

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Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:
On the other hand, I'd rather live like Thoreau on Walden Pond these days...er, well...Walden Pond with a high-speed internet hookup that is.

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the biggest problem to solved was figuring out how to use up all our leisure time.

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I'm told that hunter-gatherer societies had to spend an average of 3-4 hours on sustenance related activities, and the rest was pure leisure. I'm not sure we've improved on that.

As for the Jetsons-style promises, well, I find myself humming the Jetsons theme every time I ride the mechanical sidewalk at Spadina station. In fact I think we need to retrofit all existing sidewalks to be just like that one.

Other technology we were promised, like video phones, is very viable right now, but somewhere between the promise and the possibility we decided we really didn't want that after all. Who wants to have to get dressed, wash your face, comb your hair, etc., just to answer the phone?

Still others got revised. We don't have humanoid robots pushing a vacuum cleaner, but we do have little robotic vacuum cleaners that look like tiny UFOs. Our Dick Tracy computer/phone/watch took the form of ever-shrinking cellphones rather than wristwatches. And food in pill form has been supplanted by food supplements in bar form.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
I'm told that hunter-gatherer societies had to spend an average of 3-4 hours on sustenance related activities, and the rest was pure leisure. I'm not sure we've improved on that.

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I think that depends on the climate, Magoo.

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I don't really care how well big companies compete against one another. There shouldn't be any big companies by now.

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A couple of things work against this. Certain goods and services -- power generation for example -- seem to need larger scale operations to be financially feasible.

I've got a 1982 (same year I graduated high school) Dodge pick-up built with 1950's technology (more fuel efficient than the 1994 car though); a forty hour week at my full-time job and then countless hours trying to write; and all the usual debts and cash shortages of the lower middle class.

When I look around I consider myself lucky. I have this magic typewriter, I still know how to fix my own truck (not so sure about the car though), and still manage to grow real vegetables most years (this year we have to settle for tomatoes and maybe a pumpkin). Our debt is low because our luddite parents and grandparents taught us not to live on credit.

That's far better than a lot of people I meet every day, and massively better than most people on the planet.

The problem with our technology is the same problem we've had with technology since our ancestors decided to break antelope bones with rocks to get at the marrow. We inevitably start fighting over which bones to break, who owns the bones, and whether the next guy has a right to use our rock. In the end we break each other's bones instead and all that juicy antelope marrow gets wasted.

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We - baby boomers, if you like - read science fiction when we were very young. We expected great things: cheap energy, an easier life, better health, longer life, less drudgery, more leisure time, equality of the sexes (since it doesn't take superior muscle-mass to push a button or solve a problem) even, maybe, a levelling of the class structure.
What happened?
What's gone wrong with technology?

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I don't think anything's gone wrong with technology, as such. Certainly it's been used for a lot of nasty as well as a number of good ends; and certainly it's brought a lot of unanticipated problems.

But many of the problems technology was supposed to solve just weren't, fundamentally, technological problems.

And of course, taken at face value, my comment about "nothing having gone wrong with technology, as such" makes no sense. Terrible things have gone wrong with technology. I just don't think continued oppression, drudgery etc. is the result of technology gone wrong.

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Originally posted by paxamillion:
Can you refine oil into gasoline at your house?

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