Les Blogs Videos

If you want to know a bit more about what Les Blogs 2.0 was like, I suggest taking a look at the videos (Update : That link doesn’t work anymore, please go here.) from the event. I can especially suggest Eight Ideas that will revolutionize the centry by Ben Hammersley, who did a very very good talk. The guy is great to listen to.

But a bit of feedback about that one. Ben Hammersly did his speech and I sadly could not ask a question because I had to leave before he was finished. What he said is very valid. In previous times stuff you did, did not scale as easily. As Hugh MacLeod said: “Real people don’t scale.” If you built swords then those swords could not make better swords. Race horses can only go this fast. But in our IT world, a better software will help you make better software. Better tools allow you to build better tools. It is quasi self-priming. He said that we might suddenly have something that will always get better and that there will not really need to be one big step forward, like with the car which replaced the horse.

There is a problem with that though and the problem might be bigger than any of us want to admit, because especially for the upper class, the knowledge workers, the problem will be minor… but only when not considering the wider impact, like riots of the lower class. What is the problem? Being able to always get better, always get more and more for less. Less money, less work, less money. Suddenly lots of people are doing stuff for themselves, personally, individually. On my wedding we had a professional photographer but while it is good thing to have somebody like this for such a special event where you want to be absolutely sure you have good pictures, more and more people learn how to shoot good photos. We are making photos personal, and hence take away somebodies job. On the bigger scale we can produce crops with less and less people. We will get fusion reactors going and suddenly don’t need to drill for oil. Everybody just has their own hydrogen generator or fusion reactor in their home. Of course those things are build automatically. The personal power grid is actually something that people are thinking about, making us all into power producers.

All this is great, but we need to redistribute money differently, or need to allow people to survive without a job, because there just will not be a job for a lot of people out there. And with all the information suddenly being free, and tools mining them automatically, you do not need so many people. People defined each other about their jobs for ages though and you can’t just take that away from them. And with less people making more money, more people have less money. I mean we don’t grow money on trees. That might really be the next trap that we are moving into. Yes, we can all be nice, connect, blog, furl, whatever, but that does not make any money and there are very few people that get the amount of traffic on their blog that gives them an ego boost big enough to overcome joblessness.

Just a few things to think about. But I am looking forward to Ben’s book.

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