I don't think it's all gloom and doom ahead, but I do think we're going to need to substantially up the intelligence of the average human if we want to exist in a future that doesn't look like constant monster truck shows and house parties.
Philosophy question: does adversity build character? In my personal experience, and looking at all the people I've encountered in life, for the most part it's quite difficult to self-actualize. If you had given me a million dollars as a 20-year-old, you could have come back a month later and I would have a bunch of crap I didn't need and would be a worse person for it, not a better person.
They killed Socrates. And they killed him because he didn't fit in. He was actually thinking for himself and asking difficult questions. One of the reasons the word "democracy" had such a bad reputation over the centuries was all the examples of the Greeks acting like mindless morons.
The Greeks were conquered. And their conquerors, the Romans, were quite concerned for many decades that the Greek influence was destroying their way of life. You can read Romans complaining that other Romans were growing soft and decadent by doing things like sleeping on a bed (instead of the ground). Once a sufficiently violent and organized group of people came along, Greek society was absorbed and diffused throughout western civilization. Greece was no more. It was Rome -- with a Greek influence.
Living in a world of leisure, thought, and self-actualization is a noble goal, but it's not a goal without a lot of danger attached to it. We need to tread carefully here and avoid at all cost making simplistic arguments.
Not that I disagree, but there is the other side of the coin that we don't hear frequently: does adversity destroy character?
Because I'm sure we can all think of more than one example.
How about this formulation: is stress, whether internal or external, required for learning?
My answer is yes. With no stress there is no desire for change. The best case is the self-actualized person, where they form their own goals and provide internal stress in order to learn more and reach them.
But even then, I think we can all think of folks with so much internal drive that they distorted their personality.
I agree that the human (all animals actually) trend is to conserve energy and minimize risks. So you need some kind of pressure to go out and change.
But I was thinking in how people get trapped by bad conditions, environmental circumstances where they are born and that are going to be with them all their life.
This "problems create character" thing suffer a little from surviving bias, in my opinion.
I'm thinking that perhaps there are some core life skills that can be taught so that people are able to positively handle more external stress and provide themselves the correct amount of internal stress.
At least I hope so. It would be depressing to contemplate a large section of humanity unable to self-actualize without chemical dependency or other problems. Not only is that bad for those folks, it brings up the insane question of whether or not such a condition is a disability.
That was the point of the argument: Will people be the winners and robots the "slaves", or will there be only a few capital owners owning (the fruits of the labors of) not a handful of slaves each, but millions of those modern "slaves" and most people none?
http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect-on-intelligenc...
Neighborhood Effects on the Long-Term Well-Being of Low-Income Adults (2012) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3491569/
On the psychology of poverty (2014) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262582311_On_the_ps...
Most of the research I found seemed focused on childhood poverty specifically, e.g.:
Childhood poverty and recruitment of adult emotion regulatory neurocircuitry https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/10/11/1596/1644154/Chi...
School Readiness and Self-Regulation: A Developmental Psychobiological Approach http://annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-01081...
How Poverty Affects Classroom Engagement http://reading4all.com/entries/page/1156
In parts of the ancient world that had mass slavery, slaveholders needed their slaves to produce their wealth, so no matter how they oppressed them, there was a motivation to keep them alive.
In the feudal system, lords needed their peasants to produce their wealth, so no matter how they oppressed them, there was a motivation to keep them alive, strong and in growing numbers.
In the industrial age, capitalists needed their workers to produce their wealth, so no matter how they tried to oppress them, there was a motivation to keep them from striking and even more so, actively consuming to stimulate the rest of economy.
In the new age, whoever (or whatever) is at the top won't need most of humans in any way whatsoever.
And for those with an inclination to create, what better than all the time in the world to pursue a talent and bask in the talent of others?
For the vast majority of people, work provides a means, not a meaning. A world without cubicles ought to reduce rather than increase nihilism levels worldwide, so I imagine self-actualization won't be the primary concern.
Health and basic income will be our major challenges ahead.
So it seems, but I really doubt it. They are not really happy doing it, they just kind of gave up on success in the real world, and go for the cheap distraction/virtual success. And I think a good percentage of them would start become really productive, once they don't feel forced to be "productive" in a way and place they actually hate and unfortunately started to hate "being productive"..
Do you have facts to back this opinion up?
It seems like other factors e.g. not dying in a war, not being persecuted for various reasons, not having the opportunity to make money with your skills are today (and have been historically) primary drivers of immigration.
So why do you think "social welfare state" rather than "rule-of-law-based liberal capitalism" is the bigger draw? Is it because it's something you already want rid of?