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- Highly relevant: Pohl's "The Midas Plague" <https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_19...>
- "[T]here may simply be not enough important things to do to keep everyone busy."
More and more these past few years I think of a favorite old science fiction story by Frederik Pohl called "The Midas Plague."
All production is done by robots. Production has become so, uh, productive that humans spend all their effort just wearing out everything made by the robots. "Poor" people must live in giant mansions with several robots and wear out more stuff than "well-to-do" people, who live in small cottages with few to no robots and enjoy leisurely, intellectual and social pursuits. Comically (or tragically), it's illegal to get a robot to wear something out for you.
I think I'll reread it today.
- This Fred Pohl book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagonist of the story gets his robots to consume his good and fears that he'll get in trouble for this but instead he gets a medal. The original version of the short story as it appeared in the April 1954 Galaxy magazine is linked from the Wikipedia article.
- Tangential, but apropos your comment especially on "The higher you go the simpler you become...", "The Midas Plague" from 1954 by Frederik Pohl is a funny story about a socio-economic perspective shift -- related to a situation where "wealth" and social status in an age of robotic automation and automated factories essentially means material simplicity and the opportunity for meaningful work. The story is available at the Internet Archive (and elsewhere on the net): https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_195...
The story was also was made into part of a larger book called "Midas World".
I can wonder if "The Midas Plague" might have helped inspire the 1956 sci-fi story by Theodore Sturgeon called "The Skills of Xanadu", which in turn inspired Theodore Nelson to create the Xanadu hypertext system, which in turn helped inspire the web? https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195... https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08
James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a more modern version of that theme of a shift in socio-economic culture with abundance -- with an old scarcity-based culture in conflict with a culture rooted in abundance-based thinking: https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp...
For me, the socio-technological version of enlightenment these days involves appreciating the insight summarized in the sig I use: :-) "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
It's just amazing how difficult it is to get people to appreciate that simple-seeming idea. Perhaps Upton Sinclair was indeed right (even as regards various forms of enlightenment?) when he said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
And that sig came from thinking about such stories as well as writings of others like Langdon Winner, Buckminster Fuller, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, or Albert Einstein (among others) -- so it is not like the core insight there is completely new.
For example, Einstein wrote in 1945: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
Although in an age where digital watches have more computer power than was used to design the first atomic bombs, even being a watchmaker these days can be problematic in the 21st century. And that is even ignoring the "Acceleration of Addictiveness" (Paul Graham) "Pleasure Trap" (Douglas J. Lisle & Alan Goldhamer) potential of watch-based "Supernormal Stimuli" (Dierdre Barrett) given the "pretty neat idea" of digital watches networked to large organizations with problematical short-term profit-driven goals involving socializing costs and privatizing gains.
Or in Douglas Adam's insightful and potentially-enlightening words: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. ..."
I've enjoyed learning from the various comments here and pointers to other resources on the main topic of spiritual/psychological enlightenment -- especially the link to the Slate Star Codex review of "The PNSE Paper".
- There is a short scifi story from the 50s called the Midas Plague by Frederik Pohl which deals with this in a very silly way.
It's available through archive.org https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_195...
- Awesome. I read that years ago but had forgotten it. Here's a link for those interested: http://www.e-reading.co.uk/chapter.php/149381/8/Sheckley_-_C...
It reminds me of "And Then There Were None": http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php
And "The Midas Plague": http://www.e-reading.co.uk/bookreader.php/1010251/Pohl_-_The...
