I was impressed by Aldous huxleys vision of a balanced and humane aplication of technology in "Island"
The book started with a quote, "In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid"
impossibilities. ARISTOTLE...afterward there was a call out for "attention" to the "here and now" and for "compasion"
It went on to tell a story about a people who learned to use, control and harness technology in a way that was focused upon human happyness and not technological progress for progress sake. Its full of jems which I find exremly relevent to this discussion.
"We" said Dr. Robert, "have always chosen to adapt our economy and technology to human beings---not our human beings to somebody else's economy and technology. We import what we can't make; but we import only what we can afford. And what we can afford is limited not merely by our supply of pounds and marks and dollars, but also primarily---primarily," he insisted---"by our wish to be happy, our ambition to become fully human."
"God has nothing to do with it," Ranga retorted, "and the joke isn't cosmic, it's strictly man-made. These things aren't like gravity or the second law of thermo-dynamics; they don't have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to let them happen..."
"Certainly not. I do muscular work, because I have muscles, and if I don't use
my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict."
"With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks," said Dr. Robert. "Or rather with everything---but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That's why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome. In the past even a duke had to do a lot of walking, even a moneylender, even a metaphysician. And when they weren't using their legs, they were jogging about on horses. Whereas now, from the tycoon to his typist, from the logical positivist to the positive thinker, you spend nine tenths of your time on foam rubber. Spongy seats for spongy bottoms---at home, in the office, in cars and bars, in planes and trains and buses. No moving of legs, no struggles with distance and gravity---just lifts and planes and cars, just foam rubber and an eternity of sitting. The life force that used to find an outlet through striped muscle gets turned back on the viscera and the nervous system, and slowly destroys them."
[...Vijaya explained,] "If you'd been shown how to do things with the minimum of strain and the maximum of awareness, you'd enjoy even honest toil." ( This expains why if machines are alowed to take on all the laborious task the human body and mind will atrophy and we will loose touch with the real world altogether)
"In Pala," she explained, "we don't say grace before meals. We say it with meals. Or rather we don't say grace; we chew it."
"Grace is the first mouthful of each course---chewed and chewed until there's nothing left of it. And all the time you're chewing you pay attention to the flavor of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaw." (this is very insticto)
