Urbanised Humanity
Recently, I’ve been thinking the harder it is to describe you’re job to someone and for them to understand .. the less job satisfaction you have. That satisfaction might have to do with your purpose in life (ack .. that does sound a bit touchy feely), but it’s just a hypothesis that requires some more pondering. Let’s saunter over to a interesting look at society in Metropolis now. The main gist “By 2008 more than 3.3 billion of the earth’s 6.6 billion people will be urbanised, rising to 5 billion in 2030″.
Back to my ramblings then, many days when I travel home looking in to massive office buildings with desks, I ask “What do all these people do?”. What do so many people need to do in an office that doesn’t actually produce goods, or is this required to produce all the services we consume. It seems that people’s purpose is now hedonism .. doing things just for your own interest. Previously we’ve noticed, in Australia at least, it seems that there are less religious people .. so what do people exist for when that’s taken out of the picture. Probably, it started around the time of the Agrarian/Indutrial revolution we were moving away from actually being solely responsible for our own survival (i.e. creating our own food and shelter). People are abstracted nowadays from growing and harvesting food (i.e the supermarket as the magic food making machine.)
But I digress … Back to this article’s social commentary. It doesn’t seem like we ever got the low life in Cyberpunk’s “High Tech, Low life” but according to this article it may still happen.
The above article mentions:
The report warns, however, that if unaddressed the growth of urbanisation will mean growth in slums and poverty, as well as a rise in attempted migration from poor regions.
It seems that Technology has outpaced the detrimental social effects, for the moment.
The speed and scale of inevitable global urbanisation is so great most countries will not be remotely prepared for the impact it will have, according to Thoraya Obaid, the executive director of the UN Population Fund. “In human history we have never seen urban growth like this. It is unprecedented.”
What I wonder though is as people get more “urbanised” usually they have less kids. At what point will we have people electing not to have children at all, one generation .. maybe two? Who knows. So what will people actually do in the city? More desk work? So what does that mean for urbanisation .. will we have people in small high density living, without children at some point? So whose running the rural parts (i.e. food production) for everyone? I guess that’s massively specialised farming machinery and a few workers to run that. But what will all these urban workers do? My guess .. is more and more in the services and entertainment area. Maybe we’ll see a new outbreak of small businesses servicing high density urban areas .. but that’s probably not much different to what we have now.
“If we do not, [in reference to the necessity to plan for massive urbanisation] and do not find education, jobs, and houses for people in cities, then these populations will become destructive, to themselves and others.”
Ahh .. back to the prophetic doom and gloom about society.
I wonder, if this massive urbanisation happens, whether we’ll end up with hippy or religious communities for people to exist in, where you work for you community to survive. Maybe, we’ll get High Tech hippies growing Hydroponic food and banding together in the outskirts?
( Via Livejournal Cyberpunk Community – Urbanised humanity. )