If you step back from earth and dial yourself into position between the top of your house and the moon, you will see that things are changing. Once upon a time, to get food, you would see the people grow their own food. After that, for a while, they went to the supermarket. Now, most of us have it delivered to our door, as you would see from your perch.
In the world, or some fraction of it, that was when things were made in factories. Lots of people using the power of the machines and the force multiplier of oil to make lots and lots of things. But soon, all of this stuff will be made by robots. Much of it is already. Now here's an anecdotal fact that I will absolutely stand behind, and which I ask you to verify in your own experience from your life or from the life of someone, you know. It comes to me in the small data of having had friends and having taught hundreds or thousands of kids. Almost none of these people wanted to work in a factory. However Rich, the assembly line made America and the developed world, and however you parse out the justice of where that money went, it is a reductive but accurate image to say that a dad who worked the line wanted better for his son, and that when women said they wanted to work, those women were of a color in class who wanted dignity, and independence. After all most black women knew all about work. I offered this context because you're not getting ready to work at the factory. Lots of my students would've vastly prefer a life of making things got directed to a life of City. I presume we can agree that there are some disadvantages in life. Increasingly this is the life where you work like a machine. Specifically, the machine called a computer to take on the cog like stress that is in binary opposition to the difficulties of, say farming, or making instruments or greeting people at your café. No way am I suggesting on sitting jobs are easy. No way can I see a future in which farming pays you more than bankiHe saying two things by default. It must be increasingly common for people to get into middle-age and retirement, and even on their deathbed who think some version of fuck why did I bother with that honor office? I was meant to paint or to put a hammer t.
Let's look forward to the time when robots make almost everything. The only people employed by these robots, a few computer engineers, those who can upkeep the robots the owners. Perhaps things will be cheaper than ever, and maybe that will lead to a glorious age of enough for everyone. But even is that unlikely Nirvana comes to pass there's a spiritual problem that's certainly parallels the economic one: what will people do? People need things to do. Even if shopping and video games and texting back-and-forth is a kind of doing I would suggest Dash and I have to believe you know to Dash that there's only so much of that kind of doing people canAnd grow, only so much of that kind of doing, which makes us less holographic or less robotic than the drones, working in the factories of the future. Two of the schools where I have worked I have suggested that we create a course making shoes. Both I was politely left out of the room. Capable and smart students – you know the ones the ones headed to Harvard – should not be wasting their time making shoes. OK. Do you know how to make a shoe. Are you sure that the life of making shoes is not a better one than a life of being a banker, and being able to buy whatever shoe you want to buy.
Why don;t students know how to lead in their own communities?