This is an archive from the previous blog.
I titled this post Canada Week 4 but this post has little thing to do with Canada.
It's just a random thought that came to my mind when I'm in Canada.
A friend of mine shared on Facebook a movie of Mark Zuckerberg's address at Harvard's 366th Commencement. The friend tagged me on the post, saying the content of the speech is similar to what I talked to him about the ideal society and what we need for it. Honestly I didn't remember well what I talked then because I was a little bit drunk, but watching the movie, I vividly remembered it and reassured the idea doesn't miss the point. Because to share my ideas is one of the purposes of this blog, I'd like to share what it is like.
Next to materialism
The idea is to realize environments in which everyone can have their senses of purpose in their own lives. Having sense of purpose includes finding your value in the society, and of course different people put their value on different criteria. Therefore, there should be different metrics to evaluate the people and society besides economic growth, which is now only clear metric today. I think this phenomenon is caused by the conventional idea where leading a stable life comes first, which is a lot of things to do with economic growth. The more things we have, the happier we can be. With the progress of automation and technology, however, economic growth is no longer the most important in developed countries. Pursing economic growth could even cause misery, loneliness and emptiness. Because sense of purpose is not directly connected with to work to survive, we need to find purpose on your own to satisfy and justify yourself, and we need different metrics. Finding your purpose is always accompanied with failure and trial and error, therefore people have to be prepared to be wrong, so is the society. That's why we need such an idea as basic income for all the people to be able to pursuit their dream, holding the safety net in case of failure.
Sense of Purpose
Many people may say it's impossible, but that's is my motivation why I'm interested in engineering such as automation and artificial intelligence. In introducing basic income, one of the concerns is obviously how to have purpose and dream although we don't have to work for our living. There are a lot of prediction that people would stop working, and the economy and humankind would stop progressing. Not afraid of being misunderstood, I'd say that it's okay, as long as they are satisfied with it because this is what they chose. Furthermore, this pessimistic prediction is based on the current education, so what if we change from standardization to encouraging them to be different from others? I'm not sure yet what education it'll be like, but one important thing I'm sure is to have ownership. In the movie, Zuckerberg uses many times a term “our generation.” Yes, it's us that create the world. It's us that make the world better for us. Don't leave it all to others, otherwise your world wouldn't have a metric that measures your attraction properly. In the current era, critical point is not money gap, but motivation gap.
P.S.
I finally came across a raccoon in the city! He was stuck in walls at a bar and got out eventually. So cute!