First off, please don't confuse this guy with the band The Upper Crust or maybe you should...Anyway, I'm not talking about them right now, as great as they are.
No, rather, let's talk about what I was thinking about as I stood at the urinal at work today.
OK, maybe I should back up a little--NO, not from the urinal! I mean, back up in the chronology of my tale...At work, above many of the urinals, there are cabinets in which are posted pages from various and sundry sections of the Los Angeles Times. In the cabinet upon which I had fixed my gaze, there was an article about how some doctor's offices are becoming linked electronically with insurance companies so that patients can be charged right there on the spot for whatever portion of the cost of their doctor's visit the insurance company will not cover. I thought to myself, "Gee, that will probably put some insurance company people out of work." Then, as I sometimes do, I extrapolated forward (If you didn't know what "Extrapolated" meant you might think I was doing something untoward as I stood at the urinal! Ho ho!) and I envisioned a day when computers and robots finally replace all human workers. At that point, the only human beings required to exist would be the heads of corporations--to rake in the dough. (Don't get all snippy with me and say, "Well, who will fix the robots?" There will be robots for that, fool! Stop interrupting...)
Well, now that you've brought that up, it occurs to me that those leaches atop the pyramid would ultimately become obsolete, too. I mean, the robots will figure that out a lot faster than we have, comrade... In the end, all that would be left are computers passing electronic "money" back and forth.
It really just boils down to a couple of computers playing "Pong" with each other, doesn't it? Why must it always boil down to PONG??? AAAAARRRGGH!!!!! Just kidding. I know why.
P.S. I see now that this drawing looks more like the robots are saying that they don't owe anyone a living, when my conscious intent had been to have the guy in the bathrobe saying it. Sorry. But it works better anyway with the way the text turned out. And, a few minutes ago I came across this article.
P.P.S. And, to make matters even more synchrolicious, a song by the band The Upper Crust just came up at random on my ipod!
3 comments:
Once I extrapolated in my sleep, and my mom had to do my sheet laundry the next day...
While it appears that the goal of all human progress is to increase our comfort to a level to where we don't have to suffer or do anything, I do think that humans will rebel against this. I consider myself one of those people who hates to be sedentary, and thus I would be miserable in a world where everything is done for me, and I also really appreciate handcrafted goods, and stuff with imperfections. Like in that book The Diamond Age (an excellent book, btw) where everything is made by nanomachines, but there is a huge market for handcrafted, imperfect goods. Of course, only rich people can afford them, but whatever. Not sure if this has anything to do with what you're talking about but I think about this stuff often.
wabi sabi is that imperfect japanese art tradition... um. but i was going to say- oh yeah, that people are becoming so stupid, that when the article you posted comes true, it's not even that hard to be smarter than MOST people. there are still smarties like you, but look around, the rest are jerry springers. right??!
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