| | Hi Philippe,
Thank you for the clarifications. I agree with you completely and the reading of "The Missing Link" that you offer is excellent. I don't think many people read that essay enough. It is an excellent essay and the arguments go way beyond any of the criticisms I see emanating from the contemporary circles of debate. The EP people would do better to look at Rand in her full context and see the value of her philosophy as a synthetic and integrated system. I am thinking in particular of Steven Pinker who probably did not even read Rand's estimate of the "Blank Slate" argument. She actually reformed it!
To be quite explicit where I stand in this discussion, I want to emphasize: I do not want to say any false discoveries or re-trials made with regard to the alleged inferiorities of certain peoples. Such thinking belongs, as you know, to the dustbins of the past. What I do want to see, is a continuous improvement of all aspects of human life! Let machines do the work! I don't want to read any essay either: "Do Machines have Rights?"
Incidentally, I want to quote something from Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":
"Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine. And I have no doubt that it will be so."
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"At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the countryman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure--which, and not labor, is the aim of man--or making beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human Slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."
I don't agree with his conclusion over the ownership of such machines, but he saw the connection between technology and culture that so many cretans overlooked in the twentieth century. Had Rand paid more attention to the revolution in technology and the future of computers she would probably have enslaved an entire population of PC's :-)
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