Rye Freethinkers otherwise self-styled as the DIY Philosophy Group (aka The Biscuit Club for no immediately obvious reason) meet every Tuesday morning, with breaks during the year. We discuss all sorts of subjects from Aristotle to Artificial Intelligence and the state of the National Health Service. Rarely do we achieve consensus, or any serious conclusion for that matter, but we enjoy listening to someone who has prepared the topic for the day and then taking it from there, wherever it leads us.
We’ve been meeting for several years now, emerging from a WEA course run by David Derrington. After he moved to the West Country, we sort of decided to carry on meeting and our membership group has remained incredibly loyal, which must prove something.
We have recently welcomed two new members who have brought our numbers up again to full complement. We seem to have hit on a formula which exercises the mind and provides innocent enjoyment for a couple of hours a week. Maybe it keeps Alzheimers at bay, though no guarantees are offered. We’re not frightfully learned, just interested in debating in an informal atmosphere some of the issues underlying our social behaviour and perception. It occurs to me that perhaps another group might wish to form in Rye and then we could compare notes.
Here are some random jottings on the subject of Artificial Intelligence that formed the starting point of last week’s meeting:
“The Bank of America claims that AI will do half of all manufacturing jobs within one generation with a saving of nine trillion dollars a year. In the UK it has been suggested that 11 million jobs will disappear.By eliminating the need to work we would be freed up to focus on what really makes us human. The scariest possibility is that work is what makes us human.
Does work give us a sense of purpose ? Is that sense of purpose attainable without work ?Does it matter if a person is idle ? Does work give us a sense of identity and status ?
Two of the commonest side effects of unemployment are loneliness and the eroding of community pride. [Why ?] If we end up with the majority of us not working would that be a bad thing ? We seem to be viewing AI and automation as a threat. Why ?
In an adaptation of that famous throwaway line by writer and broadcaster John Ebdon following his regular trawl around the BBC sound archives in the 1960s and ’70s: “Anyway, if you have been, thank you for reading”
Photos: library images