Death of Leisure? (was Re: Trans-extropian principles)

Tim Freeman (tim@infoscreen.com)
Tue, 30 Jul 1996 09:24:43 -0700


From: Lyle Burkhead <LYBRHED@delphi.com>
>The Darwinian competition is going to turn rather vicious, and people
>with frivolous goals may not survive.

I agree with Lyle that this is going to happen eventually, not too
long after there becomes a variety of highly effective things a lot of
people can do to accelerate their own personal evolution.

However, it doesn't seem to be a commonly held view; lots of people
seem to believe that the technology will always create usable
resources faster than the accelerated personal evolution will entice
people to use them up, leaving each person with plenty of time for
leisure and frivolous pursuits.

This has immediate consequences. If you think things will get
competitive eventually, you can start learning how to compete now.
Since we are a social animal, tying to be intelligently social is part
of this.

If you think things will be loose and have lots of room for leisure
for the indefinite future, you might as well go have fun now. Since
there is unlimited slack in your future, there's no need to preserve
relationships with anybody; there will always be more people, and even
if you gratituously offend everybody on hand, you'll still have
unlimited slack, maybe just a little less.

I think the stereotypical rude extropian has a wrong expectation about
how much slack is available in the long term.

Tim Freeman