It looks pretty lonely and soul crushingly transactional. A world where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of goods and services?
Wouldn't it be much more fun for the mother and child to spend time together baking something, than sliding recipes around the world? They've created a vision of the future that allows a father to manage his daughters homework like an employee in a cube farm, simply to avoid interacting with her and spend more time with Excel. Congratulations, but it's far more important to destroy work than relationships.
The medium is the message and this medium says it's far more important to have some slick glass thing 'interacting' with people than to just spend time with them. This ideal takes us so far away from being present in the moment. I could care less about the productivity of the future, I care far more about the personalization of the future.
> Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of goods and services?
Because we've been propagandized into wealth/success race and sold out to consumerism. There's less money in spending time with F&F (also it sets bad precedent, that of enjoying life rather than paying for experiences. The 1% can't allow that.)
You hypothesize a world-spanning conspiracy where simple economics works just fine. People work because on average they value the fruits of their labor for the relevant time more than the other things they could be doing, through simple principles of declining marginal utility. If all you did was spend economically unproductive time with friends and family, trading a few of your abundant hours for some other gain would seem like a good trade. (Since it is.)
Where you go wrong is forgetting that "friends and family" time isn't a magical good; it's subject to declining utility, too. (In fact I think you'd find many people would pay some amount of money to not spend all their leisure time with their family, however you define it....)
If you, personally, aren't getting enough F&F time, stop ranting at the distant, half-mythical "1%" and fix it. You'll find they're not actually stopping you.
>> Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of good and services ?
Those things aren't achieved by technology. In the 18/19 century , peasants in Russia worked all summer , and in the whole winter they rested in the house with family.
Those things are achieved by a decent social order combined with frugal mentality by individuals and societies.
Wouldn't it be much more fun for the mother and child to spend time together baking something, than sliding recipes around the world? They've created a vision of the future that allows a father to manage his daughters homework like an employee in a cube farm, simply to avoid interacting with her and spend more time with Excel. Congratulations, but it's far more important to destroy work than relationships.
The medium is the message and this medium says it's far more important to have some slick glass thing 'interacting' with people than to just spend time with them. This ideal takes us so far away from being present in the moment. I could care less about the productivity of the future, I care far more about the personalization of the future.