Understanding Human Effort

About

As we go about hacking civilization for a brighter future, we must ask - what does humanity currently spend its time upon? Assuming that life is 'work' - what do people do with their lives? More specifically, if we exclude leisure time - what do people actually work on - whether they have work-life integration or not? This page is dedicated to exploring what people spend time on in order to improve these choices.

For example, the mere fact of compulsory work, as opposed to work to pursue one's true interest - is a bad design that keeps people from achieving their potential. Let's take a look at various areas of endeavor to see what we can do.

School

It seems to me that school can benefit students much more greatly if students worked on applied problems instead of on theory and on preperation for soul-crushing office cubicles. Imagine if classrooms could coordinate globally to work on pressing world issues, or applied design problems - from products to innovating institutions. What would be required to achieve this? Imagine that millions of students all work on issues that affect them all.

First, identify certain no-brainer issues that affect everyone. Clearly topics such as those listed at Pressing World Issues can be a start.

Second, agree to pick one.

Third, leverage global collaboration tools such as wikis or the internet, and soon remote control, robotics, exoskeletons with augmented reality that lets you build anything in local microfactories. So that individuals can collaborate on large problems, before they enter the 'workforce'. If open source and productive, such learning eliminates compulsory work as people can generate value by plugging into Distributed Productive Ecosystems.