yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) (04/15/90)
In article <1485@gara.une.oz.au> pmorriso@gara.une.oz.au (Perry Morrison MATH) writes: >In article <22568@cs.yale.edu>, news@cs.yale.edu (Usenet News) writes: >>I'm simply stating my belief >> that we haven't got the gumption to almost totally abandon our lousy-tech- >> nology-based lifestyle, being the selfish humans we are. > >Part of it the value system that pumps out of the TV. Illich called it >"relative poverty". i.e. even though I have a good quality of life, the TV >and other media outlets convince that I'm really quite poor (and, hence it >seems, unhappy) because I don't have a porsche, pool, villa .... >When I get these then I can be truly happy. Of course they are manufactured >needs- a porsche is capable of several hundred (?) km/hr, yet it will mostly >putter along at 60 km/hr- 120 say. Who needs it? What need does it really >fulfill. I won't deny that this "relative poverty" exists -- but it's not the problem. The car with the worst emissions (by a couple orders of magnitude) is not a 928 or 911, but a cheap, ugly, _East_ German vehicle with truly horrid performance (source: Newsweek). This is a _technological_ problem. The solution is to develop clean, affordable, and fast ground transportation vehicles (and yes, "fast" and "affordable" are value judgements, but so is "clean"). >If we could eliminate these kinds of values we'd be well on the way. While I agree that there is more to life than emulating the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, I hope you aren't suggesting imposing your own values on other people through the use of force. Environmentalists (like Fundamentalists, Marxists, etc.) have every right to proselytize for their value system, but I don't want any group to use the state to supress other value systems. >2. I don;t think that nanotechnology (or any other technology) will solve >the problems discussed above. They are political problems mainly. That's >how they should be tackled. I disagree -- energy generation, pollution reduction, and resource utilization are all primarily technological issues. Political institutions can be used to limit the degree to which individuals can risk or damage the environment of others, but they shouldn't otherwise restrict individual freedom. For example: a law setting limits on auto emissions is reasonable -- a law banning sports cars is not. I would much rather live in a city where everyone owned Porsches than one in which everyone owned the aforementioned East German pollutoboxes. _______________________________________________________________________________ Brian Yamauchi University of Rochester yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu Computer Science Department _______________________________________________________________________________