When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched.
Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @10:38AM
The world is in a painful transition to the proverbial "post scarcity" society where Everything is automated and done by AIs. The problem is how to get there. One very smart guy has said it cannot be done/won't be done and that the answer is to indeed go full Luddite.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/04/03/0250211 [soylentnews.org]