How would I titled this post? There were so many possibilities...
1. What's the difference between slavery and employment? (A. Employees get paid)
2. What you do if you didn't have to work?
3. My robot army.
Actually, I just changed the title again after writing this essay. You're going to have to read to the end for everything to make sense.
Nano-technology is tedious, incredibly tedious. The processing steps are long and it's hard to keep a straight head when working on these projects. After 1~2 straight days of work I get tired of it, then I take a break and then forget what exactly I was doing in the "grand scheme of things." There are lots of little problems that pop up that needs to be addressed and these problems are addressed usually through experimentation. Experimentation is when you do something new, unfortunately we spend most of our time fine tuning processing steps to get what we want; and what a pain it is.
As a result, I have been dreaming of my own robotic army to do my bidding. What if I had robots to do all the tedious work? What if I could spend my time dreaming up experiments and have my robot army do the experimental work while I check on the experimental results? Wow, this would be excellent! I've been dreaming about this for the last half year!
I've been thinking of all the boring jobs I could automate. Seriously, have you ever done a boring job before? It rots the brain and I can't believe how many of these jobs are out there. I often feel terrible for all the people that work the registers, the store stockers, the bank tellers, the cell phone customer support people and more. As hard as I think about these jobs, I could never find any sort of satisfaction from of these kinds of jobs. I also think that many people think the same way... but it's what pays the bills. I even used to do a few!
So where does job satisfaction come from? I have no clue where it comes from for other people but I do know where I can find it for me; and in a single word, the answer is simply impact. I would be incredibly happy if I was the first to discover canned foods, find a simple way of mass producing them and selling them to sailors or travelers on the first long distance boat rides across the Atlantic. It would be incredibly satisfying for me to find a way to improve or change the way things are done and can easily imagine others feeling the same way. It would be like taking a challenging task and make it simple or finding something that we abhor doing and finding a way of doing less of it. The greatness of the impact is proportional to the degree of improvement!
This innate desire to for me to find better ways of doing things has been with me since birth. As a baby, I would chew off a chunk of the rubble nipple of a baby bottle to guzzle the milk instead of just sucking the whole time. By the age of 4 I did math drills (simple addition and subtraction) but I hated counting with my fingers to solve these problems, so I devised a clever trick of looking for all the problems that were the same, solving it once and writing the same answer for all of them! It worked great... until I got caught when I wrote the wrong answer for all of the same problem.
In grade 9, our math teacher would always give us loads upon loads of math questions... and what we didn't finish in class, we would end up doing at home. My friends and I would race each other in class to find out who could finish the fastest and I would always be looking for faster ways of getting my math work done. We all agreed at that "Math hell" would be nothing but "Tedious math!" I still think that statement rings true today and the most generalized rule would be to drop the "math" and you'd get "hell" = "tedious."
Perhaps the invention of the first cash register and the first people that used them was satisfying, but I am sure that nobody now finds any satisfaction using them (unless, you're the business owner!). Perhaps we will all be happy with the first reliable automated check out so we can move on and do better things. When thinking like this, it becomes evident to me that "quality of life" means "improving quality of life."
So what is "quality of life" anyways? I think that's an answer you're going to have to find yourself and ironically it's an answer lies within itself.
For you mathematicians and engineers out there, quality of life is a "first order differential equation!" And make sure the derivative is positive!
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