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If the questions and issues are on removing poverty, technology does provide answers. The only reason why such issues still exist is because they were never on the human agenda. The anti technology professor Ted Kaczynski (aka UnaBomber) and the past Luddites are not really against technology if one does pay attention closely to what they are saying ~ they are against human behaviour (Application of technology). The way men use technology for. Those who fear technological unemployment are worried more on having access to resources (which is currently based mainly on wage system) rather than against technology.
The option is always available out there: for all currently yet to be automated jobs to be shared among all which reduces the working hours for all while maintaining the same output vs stuck with current outdated wage system where there will still be a small group of overworked workers in yet to be automated jobs coupled with a potential rise in crime from remaining large group of retrenched workers.
"...Isn’t it obvious that the whole purpose of machines is to get rid of work? The sole rational solution would be for the community as a whole to issue itself credit—money— for the work done by the machines..." ~ Alan Watts
Unemployment was fought by increasing jobs or just by hiring extra workers and dividing up the work between everyone."― Vivir la utopia (Documentary)
Science and engineering produce 'know-how'; but 'know-how' is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence...Can education help us to finish the sentence ? ― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
While creating new and better means for mastering nature, he has become enmeshed in a network of those means and has lost the vision of the end which alone gives them significance— man himself. While becoming the master of nature, he has become the slave of the machine which his own hands built. ~Eric Fromm, Man For Himself
Main problem lies with the current society setup which is based upon a monetary system that deviates from Kant's Humanity as an end in itself principle (以人为本的根本原则). Bertrand Russell (Including Alan Watts, Henry George ) has provided his insights on this in his article below.
Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness:
...concealed by finance...borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present...a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist...
odern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief.
M
or example, suppose a forested region is occupied by a number of small, rival kingdoms. Those kingdoms that clear the most land for agricultural use can plant more crops and therefore can support a larger population than other kingdoms. This gives them a military advantage over their rivals. If any kingdom restrains itself from excessive forest-clearance out of concern for the long-term consequences, then that kingdom places itself at a military disadvantage and is eliminated by the more powerful kingdoms. Thus the region comes to be dominated by kingdoms that cut down their forests recklessly. The resulting deforestation leads eventually to ecological disaster and therefore to the collapse of all the kingdoms.
Here a trait that is advantageous or even indispensable for a kingdom's short-term survival-recklessness in cutting trees-leads in the long term to the demise of the same kingdom. 7 This example illustrates the fact that, where a self-prop system exercises foresight, 8 in the sense that concern for its own long-term survival and propagation leads it to place limitations on its efforts for short-term survival and propagation, the system puts itself at a competitive disadvantage relative to those self-prop systems that pursue short-term survival and propagation without restraint.
~ ANTI-TECH REVOLUTION, Ted Kaczynski
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Alan Watts "Money, Guilt, and the Machine"
Now what happens then when you introduce technology into production? You produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods but at the same time you put people out of work. You can say, "Oh but it always creates more jobs. There will always be more jobs." Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption, and one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren't even beautiful. And therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working, because we believe as good Protestants that the devil finds work for idle hands to do. But the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked, that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary. And if we don't allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self-frustration.
So then if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force and they have to operate on a very much diminished income, (say some sort of dole), the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does not have the wherewithal to buy his products. And therefore he has invested in this expensive automative machinery to no purpose. And therefore obviously the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce.
This was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still, in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories...everything going. But suddenly because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor - starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering. It is ingenuity. You see we are psychologically back in the 17th century and technically in the 20th.
Fuller was a pioneer in thinking globally, and he explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design. He cited François de Chardenèdes' opinion that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" (essentially, the net incoming solar flux, had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon (US$300,000 per litre) to produce. From this point of view, its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings.An encapsulation quotation of his views might be, "There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance."
Fuller was concerned about sustainability and human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet remained optimistic about humanity's future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life," his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" caused him to conclude that at a certain time during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities had become unnecessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. He declared: "selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.... War is obsolete." He criticized previous utopian schemes as too exclusive, and thought this was a major source of their failure. To work, he thought that a utopia needed to include everyone
“I once put it rather pungently, and I was flattered that the British Foreign Secretary repeated this, as follows… namely, in earlier times, it was easier to control a million people, literally it was easier to control a million people, than physically to kill a million people. Today, it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people. It is easier to kill, than to control…"
"Technology will make available to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm." ~ Between Two Ages
"Human conduct, some argue, can be predetermined and subjected to deliberate control. Man is increasingly acquiring the capacity to determine the sex of his children, to affect through drugs the extent of their intelligence, and to modify and control their personalities. Speaking of a future at most only decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, "I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain." ~ Between Two Ages
Jules Henry - Culture Against Man
Fundamentally, values are different from what I call drives,and it is only a semantic characteristic of our language that keeps the two sets of feelings together. To call both competitiveness and gentleness "values" is as confusing as. to call them both "drives." Drives are what urge us blindly into getting bigger, into ·going further into outer space and into destructive competition; values are the sentiments that work in the opposite direction. Drives belong to the occupational world; values to the world of the family and friendly intimacy. Drives animate the hurly-burly of business, the armed forces, and all those parts of our culture where getting ahead, rising in the social scale,.outstripping others, and merely surviving in the struggle are the absorbing functions of life. When values appear in those areas, they act largely as brakes on drivenness. Though the occupational world is, on the whole, antagonistic to values in this sense, it would nevertheless be unable to function without them, and it may use them as veils to conceal its' underlying motivations.
In our own culture the outstanding characteristic of promo-table executives is drive.1 It is no problem at all to locate jobs requiring an orientation toward achievement, competition, profit, and mobility, or even toward a higher standard of living. But it is difficult to find one requiring outstanding capacity for love, kindness, quietness, contentment, fun, frankness, and simplicity. If you are propelled by drives, the culture offers innumerable opportunities for you; but if you are moved mostly by values, you really have to search, and if you do find a job in which you can live by values, the pay and prestige are usually low. Thus, the institutional supports-the organizations that help the expression of drives-are everywhere around us, while we must search hard to find institutions other than the family which are dedicated to values.
Americans conceive of drive as a consuming thing, and in some people a drive may grow so strong that it engulfs the person who has it and those who come in contact with him. In the American conception, drives can become almost like cannibals hidden in a man's head or viscera, devouring him from inside. Urged on by drive, the American then may consume others by compelling them to yield to his drivenness. Values are merely ideas about good human relations, and though they do give people direction, they lack the compelling power of drives because they do not have institutional support. Americans get heart attacks, ulcers, and asthma from the effects of their drives, and it seems that as exotic cultures enter the industrial era and acquire drive, their members become more and more subject to these diseases.
Among the first to describe the driven quality of industrial society was David Ricardo, whose central discovery was that it is driven by its productive forces to a constantly spiralling expansion and change. Unless the reality of this process and its capacity to drive the culture inexorably is understood, the fate and the dilemma of the American people are not comprehensible. The vast natural resources of the United States made possible,though they did not determine, the coupling of great industrial development with technical creativity. Put to use in the laboratories of basic science, creativity results in. new discoveries and inventions, which produce industries offering new products. Since they are new, demand for them must be stimulated, and the creation of new wants results in further industrial expansion; but since constant industrial expansion depletes and exhausts natural resources, scientists are paid to find new ones so that America itself will not become exhausted. The effort to increase productive efficiency is an expression of industrial growth, and that effort has pushed scientists, engineers, and inventors still further into research and discovery, with the result that still more industries have been born. In view of all this, 'it is not surprising that the ideal American is an inexhaustible reservoir of drive and personality resources; one who, while not using up what he has, yet exploits his personality to the best advantage. To function inefficiently, to permit one's accomplishments to fall short of one's potentialities, is the same as using one's industrial capital inefficiently and is considered a symptom of neurosis.The increase in the population of the United States and a rising living standard during nearly a century of rapid growth of productive facilities have helped solve the problem of the spiralling relationship lie between production and the need for an expanding market. Often primitive people cannot permit too many children to survive, for, given their technology, there simply is not enough to feed a large population in a harsh and niggardly environment. In America, until recently, the situation was the reverse: the productive machine seemed so efficient and nature so generous that a growing population appeared necessary to buy all that could be produced. Whereas in the Far East government officials might worry about overpopulation, in America even as late as 1961 the Government welcomed every infant as a potential customer.
In 1962, however, the impending danger from automation,which had been hidden by Government and industry in the economic closet for seven years,3 could no longer be denied, for it was eliminating jobs so fast, while the population was still growing, that chronic unemployment had become a persisting source of anxiety. In America there is an asymmetry and imbalance among products, machines, wants, consumers, workers, and resources. It is never certain in our culture that a new product will be wanted or that an old one will continue in demand; on the other hand,there are always some economic wants that are unfulfilled. There is a continuous race between consumers and products: consumers must buy or the economy will suffer, and there must always be enough products to satisfy consumer demand. There must always be enough workers to man the machines, and there must always be just enough machines turning to absorb enough workers. Finally, there must always be enough raw materials to manufacture the needed goods, and the proper instruments must be produced in order to provide the raw materials necessary for manufacture. Unlike .the ancient Greeks, the Americans have no gods to hold their world in equilibrium, and for this reason (and many others) America gives a visitor-and even a sensitive resident-the feeling of being constantly off balance, though many of our social scientists maintain that society is in equilibrium. Imbalance and asymmetry, however, are necessary to America,for were the main factors in the economy ever to come into balance, the culture would fall apart. For example, if consumer wants did not outstrip what is produced, there would be no further stimulus. to the economic system and it would grind to a halt and disintegrate. If there were ever a perfect balance between machines and workers to man them, then new industry would be impossible, for there would be no workers for the new machines, and so on. True equilibrium-balance, symmetry, whatever one wishes to call it-is poison to a system like ours. In the United States, facilities for producing increasing quantities of products in constantly growing variety increase faster than the population, and since ·the lag must be taken up by the creation of needs, advertising became the messiah of this Era of Consumption, so well described by Riesman and Eric Fromm.
The idea of obsolescence-or, better, "dynamic obsolescence" - has become such a necessary part of contemporary Americaµ thinking and life that it deserves a place, ·along with achievement, competition, profit, and expansiveness, among the drives. "Dynamic obsolescence" is the drive to make what is useful. today unacceptable tomorrow; to make what fitted the standard of living of 1957 inappropriate even for 1960.
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