Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Is Spookybot a zombie?
JimC:
--- Quote from: Thrudd on 03 Aug 2017, 06:48 ---since humans are not physically specialized and most, with the proper training, could substitute for any another.
--- End quote ---
Highly debatable I submit, even though it may not be politically correct to say so.
Is it cold in here?:
Some of us are admittedly much better suited for gestation than others. Aside from that, though, except for jobs that require people from a flat part of a bell curve, we've fairly interchangeable. An escrow processor could learn to be a veterinary technician and vice versa.
JimC:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 03 Aug 2017, 16:05 ---we've fairly interchangeable. An escrow processor could learn to be a veterinary technician and vice versa.
--- End quote ---
Absolutely not in my experience.
Take my own example. I have a problem with calculus. I just don't grasp it. I've had three attempts at learning it, including at one of the best schools in my country and at one of the best universities in the world. The teachers involved have successfully taught thousands of people the calculus, and I was well motivated to learn because without it my chosen career paths were closed off. The only logical explanation is that there's something in my mental makeup that provides a block.
There are other examples too. I'm a lousy manager. I find it almost impossible to deal with people who are not performing adequately, and I cannot manage to enthuse people who aren't achieving and help them become adequate workers who earn their wages. I'm also dreadful at concentrating on routine administration and boring repetitive tasks - my concentration goes out of the window and throughput plummets. The only manager I can learn to be is a piss poor one, and the same would be true of a basic administrative role. I could only ever do it very badly.
Of course there are also things I am quite exceptionally good at, but that's not important here.
To my mind this tendency to assume all people have equal potential causes a lot of problems. Why do we, as a society, not value the people who have the mental makeup to do the lousy jobs? We should celebrate the office worker who can accurately fill in all those stupid forms just as much as we celebrate a reality television star. As I probably say too often, if there's a serious infectious disease outbreak the most important person in the company is the one who cleans the lavatories.
JoeCovenant:
--- Quote from: JimC on 04 Aug 2017, 01:44 ---
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 03 Aug 2017, 16:05 ---we've fairly interchangeable. An escrow processor could learn to be a veterinary technician and vice versa.
--- End quote ---
Absolutely not in my experience.
Take my own example. I have a problem with calculus. I just don't grasp it. I've had three attempts at learning it, including at one of the best schools in my country and at one of the best universities in the world. The teachers involved have successfully taught thousands of people the calculus, and I was well motivated to learn because without it my chosen career paths were closed off. The only logical explanation is that there's something in my mental makeup that provides a block.
There are other examples too. I'm a lousy manager. I find it almost impossible to deal with people who are not performing adequately, and I cannot manage to enthuse people who aren't achieving and help them become adequate workers who earn their wages. I'm also dreadful at concentrating on routine administration and boring repetitive tasks - my concentration goes out of the window and throughput plummets. The only manager I can learn to be is a piss poor one, and the same would be true of a basic administrative role. I could only ever do it very badly.
Of course there are also things I am quite exceptionally good at, but that's not important here.
To my mind this tendency to assume all people have equal potential causes a lot of problems. Why do we, as a society, not value the people who have the mental makeup to do the lousy jobs? We should celebrate the office worker who can accurately fill in all those stupid forms just as much as we celebrate a reality television star. As I probably say too often, if there's a serious infectious disease outbreak the most important person in the company is the one who cleans the lavatories.
--- End quote ---
It's an age-old "truism"...
The higher you climb, the less you do, the more you get.
The disparity between wages and effort is ridiculous.
(Unless you are talking about the 'grunts' in the oil industry. Seriously difficult and tasking labour. Very nice pay... when looking at it from a working class perspective. But even then, follow the chain higher, wages become insane.)
Thrudd:
Ah but here is the crux.
Humans have variability withing their design and cognitive capabilities due to the intricacies and chaos that is a biological system.
But those frail blobs of fat are limited in their ability to share information experience and skills with similar blobs of fat through time and space.
A construct such as society attempts to circumvent those limitations but the root weaknesses of the system come into play more often then not.
I am not sure if humanity has as yet reached another quantum shift to society at large or not, though there are plenty of examples on the smaller scale [ech on a tangent - sorry]
A hive mind - the original root of this discussion by the way - would not have those limitations since each individual unit would have access to the sum of experience knowledge and skills collected by the whole.
How the mass aggregation would behave is something to speculate on but until someone builds something similar we may never really know.
Would it physically behave like an amoeba or maybe something like simple zooplankton or more unnerving yet, slime mold or swarms.
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