Infrastructure

The recent technology boom, primarily centered in the computer sciences, may indeed be less than a major advancement for mankind in the big picture. My thoughts on this come from my recent experience of having the water line to my house from the city water supply burst late on a Sunday night. Water, that precious resource, gurgled up from the asphalt in front of my house. The fountain was allowed to form a stream and several small icy ponds along the walks of my neighborhood. The police came. They stared. They were concerned, polite, responsive, but they really couldn't do a single practical thing to remedy the situation. They spoke of having to block traffic on the two-lane boulevard, where the flow was headed. Two days later, after many head scratchings, a temporary rubber hose hook-up to a neighbor's water supply, and a staggering quote from a contractor, two men showed up with a small, almost toy-sized excavating tractor. They spent the morning digging, uprooting, grumbling and removing tons of dirt. The broken pipe was extracted. The new pipe was threaded with great difficulty into the basement and to the water main. The several city representatives of the Department of Public Works inspected and laughed and blessed the work. The dirt was piled back into the hole. Everyone left well before nightfall. While the tiny tractor-cum-shovel may have been designed with the help of computer technology, the actual labor was mostly human and physical. No computer alone could have fixed the problem. The two diggers, working for the contractor, are immigrants. The contractor is an immigrant from another country of origin. It became obvious to me that the maintenance of our infrastructure, the utilities and other things that make life livable, has been jeopardized by loss of an educated native-born work force, which is dedicated to the timely and efficient fixing of things. The cost of maintaining infrastructure, especially in this case, is becoming exorbitant. And the accomplishment of timely repair of broken things is viewed as near miraculous. Where will this lead as world population both booms and ages? How can the obsession with technology benefit this impending crisis? Robots? Clones? Chimps with brain implants? Part of my practice is a consciousness that hard physical labor is honorable and necessary. In dealing with those who do hard labor, I strive to be fair-minded and expect to be treated fairly as well. But my consciousness alone cannot compensate for the general disregard of the value of hard labor and the general exploitation of our social ignorance of the problems of infrastructure.