Technology is not neutral. FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) wants to make all decisions for us and dissolve us into all-consuming bots while the machines do all the thinking and making.
Humans are workers, not to be hedonistic jobless throwaways.
We seek meaning and identify ourselves through our labor. But our biggest misconception is presuming that the job we don’t like also defines us. The only benefit to rising automation is that it opens up opportunities to do what people enjoy.
The artist Brian Eno once offered this prescient advice: ‘Try not to get a job.’
By not working for cash, we can follow our deepest passions, thereby subverting the Sex and Cash theory that says that we must toil in our office cubicles so we can do what we intend to on the side.
“Men have become the tools of their tools,” quipped Thoreau, who was lucky enough to leave his job for Walden’s pond because he enjoyed the relief of a big bank account.
As Frank Chimeo once tweeted, “Thoreau had enough money to go to Walden Pond because he revolutionized production methods at his father’s pencil factory.”
The book of nature has no choice but to accept the permanent integration of Frankensteins and robots.
Those enthusiastic and creative, especially those augmented by brain chips, will still find meaningful work and develop an abstract relationship alongside the programmatic and ultra-productive automatons.
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