I heard this from my Mum (so it must be true ;-), but I believe in France
they have cut the working week down to four days.
Now add job-sharing to the soup: a concept that has been very difficult to
maintain in all but a few narrow occupations in the past.
Augmentation could make a success out of that.
Cheers,
Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Armstrong" <eric.armstrong@sun.com>
To: <unrev-II@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 5:55 AM
Subject: Re: [unrev-II] Availability of Knowledge & Consequences of
Efficiency
> David Kankiewicz wrote:
>
> > P.S. Some how, you've made me convince myself that it has to be
> > created,
> > no matter what the cost... Hmm, I'm still thinking...
>
> Super discussion David. I wish we had the kind of collaboration tool
> we've been
> envisioning to carry it on, IBIS-style. I feel like we have a common
> goal -- to
> arrive at, or predict the arrival of, some kind of system that "works",
> and we're
> both struggling with a series of obstacles, alternatives, and
> implications that we're
> trying to make sense of.
>
> In my contracting, I've found that the majority of weeks, I work 32
> hours. That
> gives me enough time to be productive, and leavs time for things I'm
> interested
> in. I usually do that in 5 days. (I'd rather work 4 days, but cutting
> back to 24
> hour weeks would be financial suicide, and I find I just can't sustain
> any
> consistent level of productivity for 8 hours.)
>
> I suspect the transition will involve cutting down work weeks like that
> -- but
> that transition assumes a big enough wage that its feasible.
>
> As a walked away earlier, I was thinking about your major premise --
> that
> over time, fewer people will needed to do things we need them for now.
> I buy that premise. Even though I am less sanguine about how far or fast
>
> that trend proceed, I suspect it is inevitable -- barring a comet,
> running out
> of energy, running short of food, etc.
>
> That thought produces *two* interesting paths for the future:
> 1) We render lots of people obsolete, by virtue of automation and
> knowledge-based systems.
>
> 2) We press the reset button, and wind up having to rebuild
> civilization
> after a long, dark age.
>
> Each of those scenarios has a strong probability. The status quo appears
>
> to me to be the lowest probablity future in the bunch.
>
> However, to return to your point -- what DO we do as we transition from
> a human-powered civilization to an increasingly machine-driven
> civilization
> that takes advantage of automated knowledge systems?
>
> How will that transition play out? At first, we'll see increasing
> unemployment,
> but it won't be so severe that it causes alarm. Later that number will
> rise.
> If we're on the ball, we'll probably enact social legislation to reduce
> work
> weeks, etc, so that we can keep consumers in enough coin to keep the
> economy moving -- otherwise, it could fall down for lack of people to
> spend money!
>
> Eventaully, we may well work our way down to 2 hour days. I hope
> so. I wonder how much suffering will occur as a result of the lag
> between our step-wise transition to that level, and the unemployment
> that precedes each step?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Sun Oct 07 2001 - 10:35:46 PDT