New ask Hacker News story: Can you tell someone what you did today?
Can you tell someone what you did today?
4 by agomez314 | 4 comments on Hacker News.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy, the story goes of how, "Tzu-Gung was traveling through the regions...he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into the well, fetch up a vessel of water and pour it out into the ditch...the results appeared to be very meagre. Tzu-Gung said...Take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light at the front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well. Then anger rose up in the old man's face and he said, 'I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine...becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul...It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them'". I don't think we have to take such an extreme position as this old man, but there is truth in saying that we have become increasingly abstracted, disembodied from our work through our interactions with machines. By abstracting ourselves this way, we become servants of the machines we use, rather than masters of them. There's nothing wrong in using computers and technology to do our work but, at the end of the work day, can we plainly tell someone else what we did that day? A carpenter can produce a chair, an accountant can produce a tax report, what about you? Were you able to use the machine to produce something tangible, or did the machine use you throughout the day? Note: I recognize that there are some disciplines that are and will remain purely abstract -such as a physics researcher. But this is the exception, not the norm.
4 by agomez314 | 4 comments on Hacker News.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy, the story goes of how, "Tzu-Gung was traveling through the regions...he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into the well, fetch up a vessel of water and pour it out into the ditch...the results appeared to be very meagre. Tzu-Gung said...Take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light at the front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well. Then anger rose up in the old man's face and he said, 'I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine...becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul...It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them'". I don't think we have to take such an extreme position as this old man, but there is truth in saying that we have become increasingly abstracted, disembodied from our work through our interactions with machines. By abstracting ourselves this way, we become servants of the machines we use, rather than masters of them. There's nothing wrong in using computers and technology to do our work but, at the end of the work day, can we plainly tell someone else what we did that day? A carpenter can produce a chair, an accountant can produce a tax report, what about you? Were you able to use the machine to produce something tangible, or did the machine use you throughout the day? Note: I recognize that there are some disciplines that are and will remain purely abstract -such as a physics researcher. But this is the exception, not the norm.
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