Original Translation
Technology

When we consider the relevance of our social structures and ideologies in society, very often we view governments, politicians and corporations as the guiding organizational and catalystic institutions responsible for the quality of our lives. This is, of course, true... but only to a certain extent. As time has moved forward, human beings have become more and more aware of nature, its processes, and thus have been able to derive inference about how to imitate nature in all its creative glory.

The result has been Technology, which is what separates us humans from the other species as far as functionality. We have the ability to create in very vast ways. If we don't want to clean sewers, we can devise a machine to do it for us.

At the beginning of the Industrial Age, a great majority of people worked in factories. Today, automation comprises 90% of nearly all factories. This has displaced humans and created a large, artificial "service" industry in order to keep humans in employment for money.

This pattern is very revealing. The implication is that machine automation is constantly challenging the role of general human labor. This doesn't mean that humans will have "nothing to do" as time moves on. Quite the contrary... this implication denotes the freeing of humanity from jobs which humans do not care to engage in, so they will have time to pursue what they choose to. As an aside, it is important to point out that society today assumes a very negative posture towards humanity, retaining the belief that if human beings were not "required" to do something, they would just sit around, be lazy, and do nothing. This is absurd propaganda.

The notion of "leisure" is a monetary invention, created because of the oppressive, fascist basis of the employment institution itself. Laziness is, in fact, a form of rejection of the system. It is a quality that only exists due to the oppression and required servitude.

In a true society, there would be no such thing as the separation of "work and "leisure", for humans should be allowed to pursue whatever they feel is relevant. To put it a different way, consider the curiosity and interest of a child. He or she doesn't even know what money is...Do they need to be motivated by money to go out and explore/create? No. They have a personal interest and they pursue it without reward. In fact, the greatest contributors to our society, such as Einstein, Newton or Galileo, pursued what they did without any regard to money. They did it because they wanted to. The act of doing and contributing was their reward.

The point here is that money is not a true incentive for anything and to think as such is to assume that humans are inherently lazy and corrupt. Laziness and corruption are products of the conditioning our social system creates.

Now, coming back to technology, we find that our quality of life, as far as functionality, has been increased greatly by the benefits of the technological tools we create. From a lawn mower to a pace maker, technology saves lives and decreases the amount of time we need to spend on mundane, difficult or dangerous activities. In fact, if one steps back far enough, it becomes clear that Technological development is the most important institution we have and the pursuit of socially helpful technology(not weapons) should be the highest priority of the culture.

At the same time, technological development is brought about by a particular train of thought, or process... this could be called "The Scientific Method". Carl Sagan was once quoted as saying something to the effect of "Society welcomes the gifts of science, but rejects its methods".

About this Pootle server