Monday, January 08, 2018

Are you wondering?

Are you wondering what human beings will do when all things of interest and value are done by machines. This question has been with us for some time now. Machines are able to do things easier, faster, cheaper and with greater accuracy. When they've taken over completely, how will we find value in our own lives? What follows are the opening lines of an article about the effects of technology,  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/07/the-future-of-work-a-history-216244
On February 26, 1928, a headline in the New York Times announced, “MARCH OF THE MACHINE MAKES IDLE HANDS,” with the subhead: “Prevalence of Unemployment With Greatly Increased Industrial Output Points to the Influence of Labor-Saving Devices as an Underlying Cause.”

What these alarming words referred to was the abundance of goods being produced in the roaring plants, mills and farm fields of 1920s America. According to a variety of statistics cited and charted by the Times, what Americans could now make was beginning to outstrip what they could consume, to the point of diminishing employment.

“More and more the finger of suspicion points to the machine,” the Times reporter, Evan Clark, claimed. “It begins to look as if machines had come into conflict with men—as if the onward march of machines into every corner of our industrial life had driven men out of the factory and into the ranks of the unemployed.”
Those who have been introduced to the joy of creativity will still find cause to make things for  themselves, even if there is no market for the sales of such incredible things. They and some observers will note the unique qualities of humanity inherent in things made by human hands that express human intellect and human emotion.

The following is from Robert MacDougall's paper "The Significance of the Human Hand in the Evolution of Mind."
“Since every intellectual advance is conditioned upon the possibility of realizing in concrete form those more elementary conceptions from which it proceeds, it is perhaps not too much to say that the hand, through which alone this embodiment of thought and purpose is mediated, is of all bodily members the most human and most noble; and that in its features and capabilities is symbolized all that man has achieved in his long upward march from the primeval ooze.” – Excerpt From: MacDougall, Robert. “The Significance of the Human Hand in the Evolution of Mind.”
If we welcome machines to take over all service and the creation of all our goods, we will become ignorant as a direct result.

Make, fix and create. Assist others in learning likewise.

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