https://heinleinsociety.org/thsnexus/

Hired Girl... other applications
https://heinleinsociety.org/thsnexus/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1582
Page 1 of 1

Author:  PeterScott [ Sat Oct 11, 2014 6:25 pm ]
Post subject:  Hired Girl... other applications

Heinlein was a master of misdirection. All these years and it only just occurred to me that the future of The Door Into Summer is disingenuously inconsistent. If you have a robot as versatile as Hired Girl, you can make robot armies. You can have autonomous cars. You can afford to replace numerous functions with robots if you can afford to get them to do the dishes. That future society would have to look radically different from the Jetsons-like vision of the fifties with robots here and there. Yet I never even thought to question it until now. When Heinlein sets the pocket watch swinging, it sure is hard to look away.

Author:  sakeneko [ Sat Oct 11, 2014 8:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Hired Girl... other applications

Society could automate a lot of stuff that Heinlein didn't mention in the story. But *would* human beings choose to create a society where robots did all or most of the necessary physical labor? And (probably more relevant) would Heinlein have believed that such a society was either possible or desirable? I have my doubts that he would, simply because he'd see the problems. Most of us need to feel useful, as if what we do contributes to society or at least the lives and happiness of somebody beyond our own skin.

Come to think of it, he approaches this subject in an early book, Beyond this Horizon. I'd have loved to read what the later Heinlein had to say about this subject.

Page 1 of 1 All times are UTC - 8 hours
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group
http://www.phpbb.com/