A time will come in human evolution when we don’t have to work hard for basic survival. We already see a lot of this if we go back to how we started as hunter-gatherers, and fast forward to the present, where each male of the family no more goes out hunting for food, and the female is not simply limited to house hold chores. As a result, our bodies have changed. Our thinking had changed.
We, being the most successful predators have systematically designed our lives in such a way that don’t see our food being killed right before us. We don’t see the slaughter house. What we get in the market is called steak that is packaged to look something like a banana that apparently has nothing to do with killing a cow. When we savor fish, it is not the squiggly thing that comes out of the fishermen’s net. We don’t know or even care about how food is processed, where it is obtained from, as long as the packaging says it has all the elements in it, as long as it is palatable. We rely on agencies whose sole purpose is to make sure the food that is sold meets the dietary and nutritional requirements. Many of our needs are met by automation and mechanization already.
In future, are going use machines to do even the elementary tasks like growing crops, hunting, fishing, cooking, packaging, supplying, driving etc. As meat and vegetables will be grown exclusively in labs, we don’t have to go out slaughtering animals or harvesting crops in open fields and eventually synthetic food will be available that needs no cooking. Economies of scale will expand and these products will become cheaper and even rationed by governments. That would be the end of cooking. Self-driving cars, household robots, service robots will replace many routine activities that we complain about now.
In future, are going use machines to do even the elementary tasks like growing crops, hunting, fishing, cooking, packaging, supplying, driving etc.
This means that a large work force will be replaced by automated and precision mechanization. This future of humanity is not an unexpected consequence, but the result of our own desire to eliminate the rut of daily chores. Technology, out brain child, is the expression of human desire to routinize certain operations so that we don’t have to struggle for basic necessities. When most basic needs of humanity is largely met using automation of processes, we would open up a whole new space in our thinking box to focus on more ethereal aspects of our existence: relationships, and even existential inquires such as What is my purpose? This existential thinking, or deep thinking cannot be performed by machines because it is more elementary than.
The goal of technology is that once the time and energy spent in our cognitive thinking is freed from the most daunting tasks by technology, the hope is that we could focus on the human-centered tasks, the existential inquires that matters the most, the things we never had time to focus on, in this rat race called survival.
This future of humanity is not an unexpected consequence, but the result of our own desire to eliminate the rut of daily chores.
