07.09.14
Today’s Culture of Lickspittle moment: Wisdom from Larry Page
From one of the computer industry mags:
In the future, we will work less and enjoy more leisure time, while being shuttled around in self-driving cars, attended by artificial intelligence that makes better decisions than we do …
“I totally believe we should be living in a time of abundance, like Peter Diamandis’s book,” said Page. “If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy — housing, security, opportunities for your kids — anthropologists have been identifying these things. It’s not that hard for us to provide those things.”
Abundance (Free Press, 2012) is a book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler that reviewer Timothy Ogden describes as “techno-utopianism at its worst …”
From the New York Times opinion pages, today:
“The only person with a secure job [in the future] will be Larry Page,??? Jaron Lanier told Maureen Dowd. “He owns the damn Cloud computer.???
Abundance: A cyanide-laced Kool-Aid served by the Silicon Valley. Or something they give to us which, strangely, always shrinks your share of any pie.
Usages: Jeff Bezos’ Mechanical Turk features an abundance of slave labor jobs that pay zero and 1 cent a piece.
While Google search always returns an abundance of links, only those at the very top of the page matter.
There is an abundance of smartphones in Pasadena, putting more computing power in the hands of owners than I had on the desktop ten years ago. Vexingly, they have not lifted many of their owners out of the SNAP program.
The Internet wondrously tossed an abundance of cash money to Zack Danger Brown of Columbus, Ohio, so that he could make some potato salad. (Now 71 thousand dollars.)
Christoph Hechl said,
July 10, 2014 at 8:51 am
That initial quote is quite nicely undone by David Graeber and observable reality:
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/
But quite frankly, that claim is so obviously false and stupid that publishing it without bashing it is a reason to fire the author.
George Smith said,
July 10, 2014 at 12:18 pm
Yeah. Thing is, when you’re at the very top of a big company like Google, like everyone else in the same boat, fabulously wealthy, you say whatever you want and even if the people surrounding you think you ought to can bullshit, they don’t tell you.