Economic Terms

Now consider this:

Put yourself  in  the position
 of a business owner and think of all the problems that
are  associated  with  human  employees:  vacation,  safety
rules,  sick  time,  payroll  taxes,  poor  performance…
maternity leave. If an affordable machine can do
nearly  any  routine  job  as well  as  a  human worker,  then
what business manager in his or her right mind would hire
a worker?

Firstly, we note that the portion of the infinite detail of human life dealing with work has been collapsed into a few key terms: vacation, sick time, etc. The terms function the same way other higher concepts do in gathering, or seeming to gather, a large amount of detail and reducing it to manageable proportions, in this case, economic statistics.

This is totally valid. However, when we start viewing people themselves - as people, as real human beings - as entities that are subsumed under these Economic concepts, we lose the humanity. Because we may do this in economics does not mean we can do it in morality or interpersonal relations. In essence, after high flown philosophizing, we must always come back to the terra firma of our humanity.

One of the signs of Asperger's Syndrome is an inability to interact in social situations. Social situations are filled with details: images, emotions, cues, odors...  One paradigm of Autism, Rain Man, shows an autistic individual who may memorize and entire phone book, but even though this is incredibly impressive, it is still devoid of detail: this memory is nothing more than a neural phone book containing large sequences of letters and numbers: there is no human detail. It is statistics devoid of life.

So also do we let our Sciences act when faced with human situations: we find our efforts are like those of children with Asperger's.

We need a Science of Life Together. That Science must then help us find our way into the future of new technologies. We can no longer allow our higher-level concepts to run rough shod over the reality of life's robustness and variety. Decisions must be made balancing "vacation time" with "quality of life" with "family life" in a meaningful way.

One of the most vicious parts of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions has been the Viewing of People as Entities within the framework of the phenomenon of the technology, instead of seeing that Humanity must retain individual value - given by Nature and Nature's God - that always remains OUTSIDE whatever higher-level philosophy may be in vogue.

notes:
quote;  The Lights in the Tunnel, Martin Ford, page 2
see:             http://econfuture.wordpress.com/


( I wonder how much our warlike history has to do with this. War is well known for taking people and turning them into "warriors" that view other people as Ally or Enemy, Body Count Collateral Damage, etc... A long process of sanitizing that which is most disgusting. )