Cognisant
cackling in the trenches
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In the film Metropolis (1927) there's a duality of two worlds, two classes, in the upper world there's the intellectual elite and in the lower resides the overworked and undereducated workers. The ensuring class struggle gets complicated as several plots intertwine and fall apart, suffice to say the workers want revolution, for fear of revolution the elite want to either kill or cripplingly demoralise them, nobody gets their way and in the end the protagonists orchestrate a truce.
The moral of the story is that the "heads" and "hands" (intellectuals and workers respectively) need each other and this duality is best mediated by the "heart" which turns out to be the humanistic protagonist. It's of particular interest that the story favours neither the intellectuals nor the workers as most other films do, there's no bad guy here (except maybe the mad scientist and his robot) because as much as the intellectuals are paranoid, it's justified, the workers are an unintelligent mob. Symbolically the workers are the foundation of the city above, without them it would fall, and without the city (which features a Tower of Babel) man would be unable to pursue the divinity of enlightenment.
“Great is the world and its Creator! And great is Man!”
The Tower of Babel is a well loved myth of the Freemasons that tells of man's attempts to literally raise himself to the level of a god, which can be interpreted in many ways, the Masons of course taking the message that an understanding of architecture is divine knowledge, basically the better the architect, the higher he can build, the closer to god he becomes, which symbolically represents all forms of science as well.
I think the modern equivalent of a Tower of Babel would be a space elevator, the creation of which would herald the beginning of a new era for mankind, of course in the story the tower fell down, some would say then the message is one of hubris, like the story of Icarus, others would point out that we now build entire cities of towers, dream of ones taller than the sky and before the Wright brothers many attempted flight only to fail, but these days there's an international network of airports, so to be likened to Icarus is for some the highest praise.
Anyway I'm getting sidetracked, what I want to discuss in this thread is the reason why I predict the duality of the city of Metropolis may become reality, how you can benefit from that, and what may come after.
My prediction is based upon the anticipation of a specific technology, artificial intelligence, dispel any thought of robots and just focus on the basics, a program is a list of instructions, bigger programmes are bigger lists of instructions, they're increasingly complicated lists with all manner of clauses so we generally don't interact with our machines directly, rather we use interface programmes that facilitate our use of them. This is clearly has limits and we're approaching those limits, but if machines were like people and understood things conceptually we wouldn't need interface software, you wouldn't need to learn how to use machines, you would tell the machine what you want and it would do the figuring out for you, like magic.
So instead of training people to be skilled doctors we would teach one machine to be a doctor then mass produce it for as many doctors as needed, likewise for every other profession, and this is what creates the divide between the intellectuals and the workers. The intellectuals are the innovators, for example a doctor who has never been trained to perform any kind of surgery, who is instead solely responsible for the pursuit of further medical advancement, so basically the intellectuals are all scientists and only scientists, and the only things they really do are study, collaborate and think.
On the other hand there's the workers, which is pretty much everyone without a PhD, they don't know enough to innovate and anything that's skill intensive is more cost effectively done by machines, so what's left for them to do is everything that's not skill intensive. Like the worker in the film who is moving great levers in response to flashing lights they won't have to think because the machines will do all thinking for them, the only reason they're a part of society's great machine at all is because the human body is surprisingly energy efficient and a robot of equivalent capability is a lot more expensive to make.
Idealistically this could be a utopia where everyone starts off as a worker and progress to being intellectuals later in life, or sooner if they've got the aptitude for it, although a more cynical (perhaps realistic) perspective would be that society would be divided into upper and lower classes, those who can afford long periods of intensive education and those who cannot, and as time went by evolution would naturally drive these classes apart until the workers are nothing but a dumb mob and the intellectuals are their natural superiors.
Except I think sooner rather than later technology will make human workers redundant altogether and a better system of education will be developed so everyone ends up being intellectuals, likely something transhumanism based, but perhaps I'm a tad idealistic
The moral of the story is that the "heads" and "hands" (intellectuals and workers respectively) need each other and this duality is best mediated by the "heart" which turns out to be the humanistic protagonist. It's of particular interest that the story favours neither the intellectuals nor the workers as most other films do, there's no bad guy here (except maybe the mad scientist and his robot) because as much as the intellectuals are paranoid, it's justified, the workers are an unintelligent mob. Symbolically the workers are the foundation of the city above, without them it would fall, and without the city (which features a Tower of Babel) man would be unable to pursue the divinity of enlightenment.
“Great is the world and its Creator! And great is Man!”
The Tower of Babel is a well loved myth of the Freemasons that tells of man's attempts to literally raise himself to the level of a god, which can be interpreted in many ways, the Masons of course taking the message that an understanding of architecture is divine knowledge, basically the better the architect, the higher he can build, the closer to god he becomes, which symbolically represents all forms of science as well.
I think the modern equivalent of a Tower of Babel would be a space elevator, the creation of which would herald the beginning of a new era for mankind, of course in the story the tower fell down, some would say then the message is one of hubris, like the story of Icarus, others would point out that we now build entire cities of towers, dream of ones taller than the sky and before the Wright brothers many attempted flight only to fail, but these days there's an international network of airports, so to be likened to Icarus is for some the highest praise.
Anyway I'm getting sidetracked, what I want to discuss in this thread is the reason why I predict the duality of the city of Metropolis may become reality, how you can benefit from that, and what may come after.
My prediction is based upon the anticipation of a specific technology, artificial intelligence, dispel any thought of robots and just focus on the basics, a program is a list of instructions, bigger programmes are bigger lists of instructions, they're increasingly complicated lists with all manner of clauses so we generally don't interact with our machines directly, rather we use interface programmes that facilitate our use of them. This is clearly has limits and we're approaching those limits, but if machines were like people and understood things conceptually we wouldn't need interface software, you wouldn't need to learn how to use machines, you would tell the machine what you want and it would do the figuring out for you, like magic.
So instead of training people to be skilled doctors we would teach one machine to be a doctor then mass produce it for as many doctors as needed, likewise for every other profession, and this is what creates the divide between the intellectuals and the workers. The intellectuals are the innovators, for example a doctor who has never been trained to perform any kind of surgery, who is instead solely responsible for the pursuit of further medical advancement, so basically the intellectuals are all scientists and only scientists, and the only things they really do are study, collaborate and think.
On the other hand there's the workers, which is pretty much everyone without a PhD, they don't know enough to innovate and anything that's skill intensive is more cost effectively done by machines, so what's left for them to do is everything that's not skill intensive. Like the worker in the film who is moving great levers in response to flashing lights they won't have to think because the machines will do all thinking for them, the only reason they're a part of society's great machine at all is because the human body is surprisingly energy efficient and a robot of equivalent capability is a lot more expensive to make.
Idealistically this could be a utopia where everyone starts off as a worker and progress to being intellectuals later in life, or sooner if they've got the aptitude for it, although a more cynical (perhaps realistic) perspective would be that society would be divided into upper and lower classes, those who can afford long periods of intensive education and those who cannot, and as time went by evolution would naturally drive these classes apart until the workers are nothing but a dumb mob and the intellectuals are their natural superiors.
Except I think sooner rather than later technology will make human workers redundant altogether and a better system of education will be developed so everyone ends up being intellectuals, likely something transhumanism based, but perhaps I'm a tad idealistic
