We do what we must because we can, for the good of all of us. ;)

How do you deal with the perpetual complain of, "Why can't we have cool new technology X?"

If society depended on efficiency, we'd be up to Economics 2.0 by now. :P


You're assuming that there isn't such a thing as charity. As well, jobs will most likely become redundant once the abilities of artificial intelligence reach a certain threshold. It could be the case that the only tasks humans are still effective at doing are purely intellectual.

This works very well until, suddenly, oops, there's nothing that you're good at that someone else can't do more effectively.

Interestingly, in the 1950s, it wasn't a dream to shrink a million room-sized computers into a volume smaller than a grain of sand; it was inconceivable. What's so hard about a little bit of biology modification? :P
What is it then?
What about the people who don't want to be helped?

IOW, due to the inherent characteristics of human nature. :P

The divide between the rich and the poor might be going up or down, but even the poor now are fundamentally orders of magnitude wealthir than tha the wealthy of days gone by.

Anyone else kind of creeped out by the idea that machines would do all of our basic survival work for us, spoonfeeding us like a mindless, retarded population whilst we could 'go out and play with the other kids'?

I don't know... Maybe a lot of people find this idea perfect... But what if the machines, say, stopped working?

Yeah, just for that I'd want to have some degree of self-reliance and independence. Though maybe I can't say much.

I'd say the basic survival work is the mindless repetitive work that is better suited for mindless machines than sentient beings.

Besides, being a kid is like the best thing in the world, aside from the fact that at that time one hasn't really developed sufficiently complex mental capacity to grasp and think of all kinds of things. Anyhow, like I've heard some smart people say, growing older is mandatory, but growing up is optional.

We command the slightly less complex machines to fix them. See also: the architecture of a computer.

Swallowing spiders to catch flies?

I don't follow you there :S

I only want a religion/spirituality where the average "good guy" (not like Ned Flanders) gets to have peace of mind and, therefore, a better perspective should his/her soul be immortal.

What I wanted to say was that each and every single person on Earth has some quality that is beneficial. Maybe that is knowledge, maybe that is stories, maybe that is a talent or a compassion, maybe it is the ability to see faces in clouds or listen to trees and maybe it is putting together cogs and wheels. There is not need for blocks and slots - what a strange analogy. If you really want to stick to such an analogy, because this is what you understand, I will try to use it. So what I would say is that for once, humans are "shaped" in a way that makes them fit to a multitude of "slots". The difference between us two in argument over this here is the following:
Looking at the humans and the possible occupations/jobs in our society, we see that they do not fit perfectly, that there are people that do not fit to occupations (or blocks that do not fit to any slots) and that there are occupations that have no people that fit to them (slots that have no blocks).
The difference now is that you seem to think (as I perceive it) that in that context the problem is that humans are "broken" or "inadequate" and that the solution is to fix and improve humans to fit into the occupations, social roles, etc. So the occupation of exploring Mars demands someone who is able to deal with low gravity, so the best thing is to make humans adapted to low gravity. My suggestion in turn is that instead society is somewhat "broken and inadequate" in that it does not offer valuable and meaningful occupations for all the people that already exist. So what has to change then is that society needs to provide this for the humans.

The reason I think that the latter makes more sense is, that society is meant to serve the needs of the people, so society should help people and not put demands on people that these cannot fulfil (except by using some scheme of competition or expensive tools). To be "social" means to value the needs of these people. In addition to that, social restructuring does not depend on any future development, on technology that has yet to be developed, because it is something that can be changed by working with people alone. And last but not least the former approach in a context of a competition-based economy means that the ability of the "blocks" to fit into the best "slots" depends on how much power (or money) that block has to make itself fit into that slot in addition to how much that block is willing to reshape itself (and loose its original, unique gestalt) and become of a shape that is demanded by the slots. In a competitive world that means that the ones that do not fit any slots may or may not have the money to change that and they may or may not have the will to make that change, but their success is measured by their ability to fit. So there is a force to fit - and consequently a force to make the needed modification - and then in the end it is seen as a gift to give these poor people the means to do so because the assumption is that they surely want to fit one of these slots, even if it is one of the less desireable ones.

Exactly. And do we really want to make these properties of society that clearly are not very desirable even more pronounced and fortified? This is what I mean with that we have to change the foundations of our society - if you start with a society that is based on these things - competition, selfishness, individual gain and has the properties of inequality, discrimination and a concept of more or less valuable life/occupations or more or less able persons, giving this society just more tools and more power will increase the properties it shows. Just as more technology allowed for more pronounced inequality in the past centuries, why should "more of the same" show different results?

Charity is usually only a minor contribution to the flow of wealth. It is often literally the used clothes and scaps from the tables of the rich. This is honorably and fine, but to first take away something and then smilingly give some of it back is not the game we should be playing.
And no, the human characteristics are not to become buerocratic control freaks - that I refuse to believe.

The question of what is wealth is another interesting one. In short, I think wealth and poverty are not absolute characteristics but relative ones. People feel poor if they live in a society that has some people that have 1000 or 10000 times as much power, material goods or access to things than they do. It does not matter how much these people actually own - they can have a TV and a cell phone and still feel poor. Poverty even is defined in legislature by having material wealth that is below XY% of the average wealth of a state. Also to define wealth only by some aspects of material goods or money is very limiting. Certainly the native americans were much richer in access to open, wild landscapes, to freedom, to clean air, to clean and safe drinking water, to fish without mercury and dioxins. And there usually is not a lot of poverty in these societies either, if you define it in relative terms because the richest man does not own more than 10 times as much as the poorest one. So I think to define wealth in absolute terms of posession of material goods is very limited.

We're alreday very much entrapped in that, which is why people cling so much and desperately to unsustainable practices like burning coal and oil for energy because they are afraid that stopping that would jeopardize their basic survival needs - the food from the supermarket, the water from the tap, the heat from the radiator - thus they defend these objects, institutions and the unsustainable processes that feed them with their lives (even if that means making up illusions or ignoring problems or just exploting other beings).

I do not think that survival work is mindless nor repetitive. It has become so in our times because human civilization invented mindless and repetitive jobs for people to do.
And yes, being a kid is wonderful, but being a spoiled kid may not be so. Compare a kid that gets all the tasty fast food it likes on demand, all the computer game consoles it likes and can watch as much TV as it wants - to one that has "only" access to a bread with butter and an apple for lunch, does not own a game console and has to play outside in the woods and gets to watch TV for some hours in the evening when its dark. Somehow I think the first of the two is more likely to end up in bored or in psychiatric therapy than the latter.
So abundance is a nice thing, but overabundance can be a problem - humans and of course also kids need to be involved in adventures and some of the basic things can be adventurous.

Greetings

Reading your idealistic views gives a lot of work for my emotion banhammer, because I can't process rational thoughts whenever there are emotions about. If only things were as you described, but they aren't and that is why my example stands as a mere reflection of what life in our current society is like.

A working system must be composed of functional parts that each serve their appointed role, because the machine will not work if you remove cogs or replace them with wrong kind etc.

I don't know about that, seeing as how some people are perfectly content in their little hamster wheels and wouldn't change a thing. I wouldn't be here complaining if I were a good hamster, but I'm not.

Of course we need a better system, but how on earth are you going to make it happen in a feasible way? We all want stuff that's better what this crummy reality can offer, but wanting something doesn't make it happen.

That goes without saying, but how to make it better?

We need technology that can free us from our complicated maintenance system, so that we would have all the necessities required without the need to have this performance based society.

Must wake up every morning, must have warmth some ways, that takes constant effort in a low temperature zone, although it is automated these times, but if it weren't, then the very first thing in the morning would be to start chopping wood to make a fire. One needs food, so it must be constantly acquired some ways, and this too is repetitive since it must be done all the time, every day. This stupid mechanical high maintenance body makes life repetitive by default, because it needs things that are hard to come by.

Sensible parenting discussion aside, material comforts do not make people insane.

Define overabundance?

Need adventure? I do not need or want adventure. I want comfort, I want... Well I will not go there in a public forum, so I will not apply my anecdotal wants here, but I still object against that line of reasoning.

But life or human culture is NOT a machine with cogs and wheels and functional parts! This is my whole point, that this idea of claiming that there IS such a machine and that we ARE cogs in it and that this is just the way it is is wrong! We are no f-ing machines and if anything in that aspect is true then that this is how we made society look like with industrialization when these concepts of looking at society as if it was a machine first came up. But that image is either wrong as an image or if the analogy holds true in a number of cases it is not how it is supposed to be and most people know this.

Incidentially what I argue here is quite similar to what the Adam Curtis movie "All watched over by machines of loving grace" says, even though I really was sceptical about some of the parts about ecology in it, it has many points that are very similar to what I came to argue here now, albeit from a totally different direction.

If anything, humans and society is more like a large living being and in that, every cell is slightly different and has a purpose. Life is organic and not assembled from some parts with some leftovers that do not fit. Do not fit whose blueprint?

I cannot give a recipe. This is not a task for some lonely saviour who cooks up the plan how to make the world a better place in a small basement. But what I say is that there is a very different way to look at what should be the focus of the attention when it comes to solving the problems.
And my argument is that what has to change is society and culture, not the humans or their tools. Society has to adapt to human needs, instead of humans adapting to a society that is shaped by others (monarchs, oligarchs, free market economy, the results of the darker human urges running rampant, the "wetiko disease"). Humans feel powerless at this "machine" and thus redirect the need for control to others. To children, to animals to nonhumans, to the natural world. Those who are weak enough to control. But what has to be is that humans take control over their own society and culture instead of trying to take control over other cultures and of the nonhuman world.

Let me ask you, why it is that despite the amazing developments of the past 2 centuries that replaced supposedly "menial repetitive tasks of maintenance" like producing food and chopping wood with machines, oil or other inventions and discoveries - how we still have to work 8 hours a day to make a living. How it comes that in the past 3 decades, the workload of the average person went up and up. My father used to work and earn enough for a family of 4, nowadays, both parents work jobs, sometimes even two. Why not let the machines do the work and bum out. Certainly all the wonderous inventions would at least make it possible to work less than a person living in the 15th century. But it doesnt work that way - because there is something fundamentally wrong with the assumptions that we need more progress to fulfil our needs alone, that we need perpetual growth just to maintain the level we have now.
I am not saying that these machines do not really save labor - they certainly do, but obviously that has not really the effect on society and on individual freedom from work as one would have expected. And thus I think more of the same will not be the decisive factor that helps along such an improvement.

Well in a way yes, in another way no. Chopping wood may be repetitive, a choice of gardening, hunting, fishing, collecting honey, collecting herbs, picking seafood, picking fruits, searching mushrooms and berries or growing mushrooms, planting vegetables sowing and harvesting grains - it is not all that repetitive in the short run. It repeats itself over a year maybe. Most importantly though, these tasks are much less perceived as a repetitive burden at least compared to lets say preparing burgers, working an assembly line or selling insurances or financial products.

Not by themselves but if there are incentives missing to do something else, it kind of gets boring.
And I am not even sure if maybe people actually do tend to a higher level of insanity if they are having too many material comforts - especially if that means that they miss other things - social comforts, adventure and therelike.

Of course we want comforts but we also want adventure. Thus we want to sit in a sauna or spa but also want to take a tour in the jungle or go paragliding. What is happening though is that in the society as it is now with the way we work now, we are actually working more and harder than it would be needed. Also we need to make more mental detaours all the time - to avoid being stressed out by some of the things mass society brings. All this makes us incredibly tired in case we are in fact not "good hamsters" or "fitting cogs in the machine". Then we just want to get some f-ing rest and sleep and not have to worry about maintenance and all that stuff. I feel like that in the evenings. But I also know from experience that this usually lasts only some time, if I get the chance to actually do it. If I get a three week vacation, I may bum out the first of it, slack on the beach or in the grass and do nothing but reading some book and drinking juice. But by the end of the second week or earlier, I will start to see if I can find some nice spot to go hiking or snorkeling and I may rent a bike or scooter to get around and have some adventures. Others may go out and have parties at night instead. This somehow tells me that this tiredness and desire to just slack out in a comfort zone is something that is not sustainable to the human mind.

Of course it's wrong, but what can you do about it? Try talking to people, and they all say that tough luck, the world just works that way, deal with it and so on.

Nature works the way that those who do not survive do not fit the blueprint of natural selection, that is the driving force of life in nature. We humans have our own selective methods and hierarchies, but life is inherently cruel no matter how you look at it.

"It is the way of men to make monsters, and it is the way of monsters, to destroy their makers."

This is more about the economy going down the drain than anything else, seeing as the pyramid scheme of monetary power is on it's way to a collapse. Now I don't really know how long, and how much worse things will get, but when it is over, then perhaps there will be a better system implemented in its place.

When everything is measured in monetary profit, then automation just means more profit to the person who previously had to employ and pay people to do stuff, and now people get laid off and have to take menial low status jobs because they have been replaced by machines.

Some people like that sort of thing I guess, but I hate, I abhor, loathe picking berries for example, because I had to do it as a child and it was so annoying that I've come to hate it even more than ever before. But I know that I'm mentally unstable and somewhat crazy, so there are plenty of people who don't mind such things, but to me these things cause serious rage.

I do not want to do things because I have to, I want to do thing because I want to do them. If anything, material comforts and wealth enable people to do what they want to do. For example, I don't have the money to go socialize with my friends in another city because travelling via train is insanely expensive here. I mean I can afford to do it, but not on a regular basis.

Intellectual adventures like reading a good book sounds nice, but physical travelling is quite tiresome. The only effort I'm interested in is intellectual.

I wouldn't mind if I had some company, as it stands it's rather lonely.

Here's an extremely interesting pair of articles I found today:

PracticalDoubt.com

The Thinking Atheist - View Blogpost

Not only is superstition is decline, but attempts to forcibly place it in people's lives can be seen as an extinction burst - when a behaviour or concept is in decline and facing extinction, it increases in desperation, before declining again to zero or near-zero. When populations in churches will consist of ~90% >= 65 years old within two decades and non-religion is the fastest growing demographic group, this can be shown to be one of the last attempts at relevance of an increasingly irrelevant group.

Necroposting on a derailed thread I never read. Probably not a good idea but here goes my thoughts:

Spirituality and religion probably came to be when people discovered psychedelic plants and had unexplainable spiritual experiences. These small animistic religions exist, where there are cultures involving such plants. Big, organised religions were (maybe?) just stories that got told a few too many times.

Where is spirituality/religion going?
Nowhere. In this world. People find no adventure in spirituality or are busy with other stuff. The only religions still alive exist only because religious parents brainwash their children or because a narcotics user finds Jesus and writes a book about it.

I dont know about it being in decline - people seem to believe in all kinds of stuff. I am amazed at how many people believe in UFOs, esoterics, homeopathy and other new beliefs, many of which in my eyes superstition. In Germany some years ago they made it so that you can get homeopathy treatments on medicare. Also a lot of faith in technology as a solution to everything is rampant. So I would not say that people have less faith, less believe in something that is not phenomenological (reality based on pobservation). It just shifted away from gods, angels, saints and other traditional concepts towards more modern forms.

I don't like religion therefor no one likes it and no one finds any use for it! It's my sweet sixteen and I'll do what I want!

That statement is correct -any one who does not grow (acquire wealth) will be left behind in poverty by those who do. However, thee's an assumption tied into it that is flawed: that jobs are necessary, and that if you do not work, you do not "deserve" wealth. If the machines do all the work, the economy crashes because we're not used to the idea of post-scarcity.

Interestingly, all the data actually shows people work less than they used to :P

It's called specialisation. Be good at one thing and have others handle other things and everyone benefits.

https://lh3.ggpht.com/_sAacAghf6h0/S...+over+time.jpg
Data: Average annual hours actually worked per worker

Eh, I don't believe that we will no longer have to work in the future. Th pursuit of knowledge can be defined as work, and I don't think it will ever end. It's not a bad thing either, since there's always room for creativity.

Yes, I agree. But that does mean that something is fundamentally wrong with the economic system we are living in which may be called capitalism or whatever you want to call it. It is a system that is based on the majority of people having the income from work as their only source of wealth with a minority living simply on the wealth generated by their ownership of property. E.g. the worker at a factory who rents a flat versus the owner of the building block the flat is in who can delegate the care for these flats to a manager.
To end this system would mean to redistribute the generated wealth - also among those who do not - or no longer - work for it. This is what Marx envisioned as communism which describes a system in which all people contribute to the overall social benefit according to their means and abilities and get back from society a rather equal share according to their needs. Of course at that time it was already becoming more obvious that machines had begun to take over work in a way that allowed one man to do the work of 30, so that is where that vision was born. The Soviet Union then tried that, but failed because of the progress arms race mentioned before - the West did not care as much for short work hours and health care and education and thus was progressing faster, while in the East progress was slower, in large parts also due to the inefficiencies of the government and simply because the country was very different from the US to begin with in terms of size, climate, wealth.

But even if wealth would be distributed more evenly and work could be reduced, the price for this is not neglible. People now could in theory work less, but only if progress was slowed down, so that some of the gains in efficiency could be reflected in more free time and not be invested in developing more progress. Otherwise in the end we will all be engineers and scientists working like mad to invent and develop and research more and more technologies that supposedly make life easier and give us more free time. Which is nuts of course. And what hangs over all of this is that all the labor saving devices consume not man-hours, but instead natural resources and most of all energy. 10 workers doing one job needs as much energy as is needed to let them live - food, heat, water, some appliances, some comforts. If a machine does the work and only 1 person is needed, the machine uses up resources and energy which usually is much higher than the consumption of the missing 9 workers. Food is a nice example of this - in history, usually people spent less than one calory in terms of workpower for each calory they gain from food, otherwise they starve. Now the agrarian sector is just a fraction of what it was, but the energy that has to be invested has multiplied so tha tnow the machinery and fertilizers and such consume 10 calories for each calory of food produced. So more progress always increases the consumption of energy and resources and is thus not sustainable.

Not really - work usually is defined, at least in much of the theories I know of, as something one person is doing for another person for which his main gain is an income or other benefits given by the employer. I dont know however if there exists a good word for the other part - maybe "occupation" - which describes simply the act of doing something productive or creative. This is of course not even desired to be ended. People really like to do this - have a garden, paint, make music, write, build a homestead,... etc. But this is not what normally is described as work.

The statistics are interesting. I think they lack one big point though - the number of people working. Beginning in the 1960ies, women entered the workforce. Over the years, the workforce practically doubled but this did not result in a 50% reduction of the work time per person, but I think it is the reason for much of the decline seen in the graph there, especially as women are more likely to choose halftime jobs. So this IMO skews that statistics in terms of overall gain in free time.
The other interesting part is that despite an almost exponential growth in productivity (you here often enough referenced Moores law) work time per person only slightly declined (the scale on that graph is not starting at zero) and in some countries it did not even do that really (e.g. USA) or even grew (Sweden). In addition, net real wage (measured by what you can afford for your wage in terms of goods and services, not by numbers of Dollars which would be prone to inflation losses) has dropped in many countries. So people now earn less than in the 1970ies. I am mostly talking about that timespan since it had vast increases in productivity due to the computer age and high technology - in many cases it tripled or quadrupled over these 40 years (not accompanied by a reduction in work hours to 1/3, especially not when factoring in women as a factor)

Okay, so is this "free time" a good thing or bad thing? And why is this "continual progress" a bad thing? So we should hamper our innovation and creativity just to generate more free time? I'm pretty sure our competitive and curious nature goes against this. Not to mention that the average annual work time has gradually decreased recently according to HNM's chart.

No of course free time is a good thing because that is precisely the time that we can be creative and innovative. Which we have a really hard time when we are entering in a work relationship between an employer and an employee in which we usually do not earn the fruits of our creativity or innovation but only a monthly paycheck and maybe a bonus payment. Even I as a scientist with rather increased freedom compard to many other employees do have to restrict my creativity to the topics I can get grants for and I would often rather like to go out and swim in a lake in the sun than sit in the lab - sometimes scientific curiousity is keeping me in the lab, but most often it is duty and a work contract that pays my rent and food. So to be against work is IMO not to be against being occupied with something, being innovative or creative, it is to be against the relationship between a worker and someone who gives the worker money for the work - in capitalism, the employer even controls the tools and space that the work is done in addition to the time and workload of the person who became a worker.
Freedom from that would be if a worker has controls over his own means of working - his own tools, his own workspace, his own schedule and in the extreme case the liberty to not do any work that he does not want to do.

Continual progress is not in itself bad, but I think it is a bad concept. Progress towards what? What we see is a change in techniques and technologies, new concepts developing, new relationships - but IMO it does not reall yhave a direction, just like evolution does not have a direction. What makes the kind of progress we see now a bad thing is that it claims to have a direction but that this direction is mostly focussed on growth. More production, bigger houses, bigger cars, faster trains, more airmiles travelled, more food, more sales, more people... basically everything faster, higher, stronger, bigger, more complex. And this direction is coupled with an increase in energy and resource consumption, the expansion is driving species and cultures extinct and frankly is not even good for the sanity of those living within the culture that promotes this type of progress.
I would maybe also call it a progress if people learned more to listen to the natural world, understand the language of the animals, explore their emotions and beneficial cooperative social structures. IMO the NA'Vi are a very strongly developed and "progressed" (yet of course fictional) culture - just their focus is not on growth but rather on balance, it is not on machines but on relationships, not about competition but cooperation and not about doing things faster or bigger, but rather doing it at a scale and speed that is appropriate.

I also pointed out a flaw in HNMs chart - namely the increase of percentage of workers due to the womens movement. The chart I would like to see would not have "average workhours per worker" on the Y-axis, but "average workhours per citizen". In that case I am sure that the numbers would increase in the timeframe between 1960 and now as more and more women became "workers".

That is quite the sweeping generalization. Also, do you think most people spend their free time being creative and innovative?

You're arguing as if working and being creative/innovative in a capitalistic society are mutually exclusive.

Uh huh. Let's see, the Boeing 787 cruises at speeds typical for an airliner (Mach 0.85), and it is far from being the largest airliner out there. But I guess that isn't really progress, eh? :grolleyes:

Um, you just typed out a bunch of rhetoric. Want to explain what it means to "listen to the natural world?" Nature is as much about competition as it is about cooperation/symbiosis, and the latter is arguably born out of the former.

It's also a fictional setting where they have an entity, Eywa, that can, to an extent, control the ecosystem and maintain the balance. You speak of competition as if it's detrimental. It's not. Also, you want to define "a speed and scale that is appropriate?" I really don't think you can speak for everyone in this world.

Consider the stats: humanity produces more culture per day than they could over 10k years. ;)

No of course not, they have a free choice, that is what freedom is about. If they are given the freedom to choose, they can be productive, creative, innovative or they can hang out and do nothing, but doing nothing can be quite boring. most people I know will do something at some point that is not just bumming out. And even if they want to bum out, then that is their freedom. In theory with the massive gains in productivity over the past century or two, it should not be a problem if some people who are not creative are free do be that. Some people may even focus on spiritual things or religion. This was done even before the productivity was as it is now - people fed their monks out of faith and because they were glad someone does that.

No they are not exclusive, but in the majority of cases they do not match up. Of course there is creative work that people do for money (though it always is rather restricted to some workplan made by someone else), but most work that people do for money is not creative in a sense that is fulfilling to the people. I think over 90% of the people have jobs that they would not want to do if it was not their best way to make money. That is not to say they hate their jobs - but given enough money (e.g. winning in the lottery) and not having to do this job - many people would do so. Some people of course like their jobs so much that they would keep doing them even if they had enough money otherwise, like the researchers of the 19th century who often were not poor at all but still did research instead of playing cricket all day. But really most jobs these days are not creative and I was argueing about this majority part mostly.

Of course it is progress - of a certain kind. The kind that values faster & bigger. Industrial progress. What I said however was is that this is not the only progress there is - there can also be spiritual progress, a progress in happiness, a progress in social relationship. Sadly progress normally is used ONLY in the sense of industrial/technological progress. And this is wha tI think we do see - people focus so much on this kind that they have a Boeing 787 flying above their heads but divorce rates and mental health problems and the feeling of spiritual emptiness rise as well because these issues are not so much in the focus. Of course if a society puts more emphasis on a progress in these issues instead of technological progress, they will not progress as fast technologically. They may be happier or feel more spiritually fulfilled but not have a airplane with mach 0.85

No I dont want to explain as this was just an example of what people might value and regard as progress. You dont have to understand it to value it. If some indigenous people would say that this is what they like to do rather than build an airplane, then that is their kind of progress.
And of course there is competition and cooperation in nature. Sadly our society focuses mostly on the competition part and believes as you said that cooperation is based on competition, which is an ideology based on game theory and other models which are not really scientifically proven. Fact is that both exist and have their place in nature, but that cooperation is what is successful in the long term and this is what a society should focus on when it wants to exist long term. In competition, most participants loose - this is not the human model. We dont lay 10000 eggs and see which baby makes it, we care for a baby until it is much over 10 years old. So I think humans are more cooperative animals than competitive ones and a cooperative society can last much longer than one that is in competition within itself and against other cultures.

I dont claim to speak for everyone of course. Many people just love competition or at least they believe they have to love it as it is natural. If it is to their benefit or not, I personally think it mostly is not.
Appropriateness is not something that can be defined easily by numbers, it is more gained by experience. But there are mathematical descriptions regarding diminishing marginal returns on investment that may hold a clue as to what is appropriate. For example the relative gain in quality of life is much higher if you go from having no electricity to having enough for a light bulb for 2 hours than lets say going from having a full regular US home and adding another light bulb for 2 hours. The investment however is the same in terms of energy. See: Diminishing returns - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How do you quantify that? I would say "culture" is really hard to quantify, as it is not value free - a book from Goethe or Shakespeare may be more "worth" in terms of culture than 5 books of cheap romance novels, so simply counting number of books or hours of video cannot be a good measure. It only is a measure of the amount of unique data produced.

I don't quite follow your reasoning, or what you're arguing for that matter. Are you advocating that people should have more free time? I mean, that option is there; it's called part-time job. People can choose to go for that if they feel that they need more free time.

Again, not quite following what you're trying to say. I think you're trying to argue that most work environments aren't conducive towards being creative/innovative. Well, if an individual is unsatisfied with that kind of work, then he is free to take the risk to pursue something else.

My example of the Boeing 787 is to illustrate that technological progress isn't always about bigger and faster. In this specific case, the 787 is significantly more fuel efficient than the aircraft it is replacing, such as the 767 and A330/A340, while operating at similar envelopes. Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with technological progress; in fact, I welcome and cherish it, though I feel that we should be cautious on its employment, i.e. being more aware of its impact rather than recklessly applying it.

Also, what is "spiritual progress?" As for "progress in happiness" and "progress in social relationship," how does that have anything to do with what you were talking about?

Uh...progress in what? Do nothing and be static and stagnant can be considered progress then? Mind you, I'm not belittling indigenous tribes and cultures.

That's a very vague statement. What do you exactly mean by cooperation? And cooperation to what extent? Cooperation in which areas?

Lose what? Again, you're making vague statements.

Using that analogy to argue against competition is a non sequitur since that's not how competitions in human societies generally work.

You want to give some examples/evidence to back that claim?

And that experience varies between individuals and societies. If you feel that the speed of progress (and what kind?) isn't appropriate, there may be many others who feel that it is, or it's that it's even too slow.

Yes, diminishing returns is a form of feedback that's important in economics, engineering, etc. And no, I don't see what this has to do with progress as a whole, since there are so many fronts and possibilities for us to explore.

That goes against almost all of human history, doesn't it?

Nope. Generally, we succeed by banding together into a yea-sized group, and then fighting it out with other yea-sized groups.