MOOCs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

BBC TV's Click ran an item on MOOCs, featuring Stanford's udacity heavily, but also udemy, which is a portal to various on line courses. The University of Phoenix offers something similar as does MIT under the MITx brand, and the University of Michigan as Coursera; and I-tunes offers I-tunes U.

It was impressive to see the academics interviews talk of their desire to remove the elitism from education and of offering their materials for free. In a resource based economy, as many limits to education as possible would be removed - and we already know that there are people who are motivated by education itself to spread education far and wide -  a task that technology can really assist.

Financial Trading and IT

Just been listening to BBC Radio 4's 'Click On' (oddly similar to Click - nee Digital Planet -  though they never mention each other). There was an item about the super intelligent computer programmers sought out and vertiginously paid by the banks to write computer programmes that trade 'financial instruments'. For all the jargon that surrounds finance, what has not one away is the idea of buy low and sell high. Computers can do this very fast and continuously, and the finest brains in the world jusst make them do it that little bit faster. The computer has to do its thing without being noticed, so that the herd mentality doesn't kick in and cause everyone to sell, or buy, or whatever.

This is how we waste our finest brains. Not working to cure disease, save the environment, predict natural disasters, overcome language barriers, digitise the world's off line knowledge and culture, improve communication, put a man on Mars, or anything actually useful - just playing glorified computer games. This is a special case of the 'any job is contributing to society' fallacy in which doing a job is by definition contributing society, irrespective of what job it is. Their job is more socially useful than feeding a slot machine all day - they're just very, very good at it.

Let's get good at killing people and good at stopping ourselves too

BBC TV's technology programme 'Click' admiringly showed a new gadget that can detect the newer type of land mine that's made of plastic to avoid detection by metal detectors. Admittedly this is clever gadge, but here we have human ingenuity (and technological ingenuity, very possibly) working against itself - one working out how to kill people and the other working out how to stop them. Still, this all makes work and money and counts as GDP, so that's OK, I suppose? I wonder whether the same company manages to make and sell both the mines and the detectors

No - it's complete lunacy. It makes discussing public sector back-office staff look like a waste of energy. Let's take a serious look at ourselves as a race here. We put our finest minds and engineers to work perfecting the art of killing their fellow human beings, and call it 'economic growth' when they sell more of their pernicious weapons.

Decouple work from the need to access the necessities of life and people can immediately stop working both on weapons and the means of neutralising or countering weapons, and do something socially constructive or if not nothing.