It's nice that we have machines that make coffee for us, but there's still a lot of monotony that goes with the process.
Each morning I must empty the jug (or whatever it's called), remove the old filter, place a new filter, scoop in the coffee grounds, and fill up the water.
Whatever; but it's like I become the machine. #blowback
You think you have things that make it easier, and I guess they do, but they introduce an element of monotony to my life that wasn't there before.
The worst is when this happens:
I go through the terrible monotonous process, I wait the whatever amount of minutes for the machine to run, and finally it's coffee time. Except it turns out I forgot to fill the filter with new coffee grounds. So I just have hot water.
It's a big slap in the face because (1) I thought it was coffee time and now it isn't and (2) now I have to do the whole thing again.
I've done this a couple times before. It's just awful when you pour and get water.
We're at the small sliver of time where we have machines that make us coffee, but we don't have machines who replace the filter etc etc.
This too will pass.
Sliver of time issues are all around us. A lot of things seem like an impossible problem, like we're just doomed into this thing that doesn't make sense or has no good solution. But really it's just a sliver of time issue and you just have to keep going down the rabbit hole. Just go all the way and then you solve it.
Abortion is a good one. Especially if you respect a woman's autonomy over her body and the life of a helpless new one. (Which all reasonable people should.) Seems like something has to give. Like ghjgfhgjfk, life just doesn't make sense.
But actually we're at the small sliver of time where we have the technology to do abortions, but we don't have a way to eject it safely into a space where it can grow and be borne out into a loving community that has some mechanism of caring and fostering for them in a way that's fair to them.
People talk about the singularity and the machine takeover as a thing to maybe be worried about.
I'm not worried. It's exponential, but I imagine it's ultimately S-shaped. It doesn't just keep going. It gets to the point where they've solved everything and it's all about tinkering and fine-tuning.
The distant future, I think, is remarkably not technological.
There's like an "engine" of technology and robots that makes everything run, but the pancake flips where it actually brings us back to being completely human.
A downside of technology is that bad people can use it too. Like right now technology is used for war and control, which also has all its trickle down effects, i.e. people rotting their mind on cable news etc. So when people are wary of it and think we'd be better off without technology, I can see what they mean. It's a fair perspective for sure. But being that there's no way to stop it, the best thing (the only thing) is to embrace it and go all the way with it.
And what our technology ultimately will do is help us organize socially, it will help arrange us in a way that's fair and best and safe for billions of people. And then at that point, we can live in heaven. When you're in a community of people who you can trust and love and are surrounded by crystal clear lakes and rivers and an abundance of fruits and gardens that are built exactly for you and your needs, you just don't think to really spend time on a tablet.
You run and play and frolic and have a lot of sex. You think, create, imagine. You pick dandelions and cuddle with all the dogs.
So there'll be an underlying engine of technology that we depend on and that made it all possible, but our actual lives and experience will have gone full circle back to the point of what we really need and what's best for us. Just now with the security and abundance that we didn't have in 2500 b.c.
That (rather than we become these new different hardly-even-human-anymore things) is the magical endgame of all the technology.
