This morning I awoke with a need to find a short story that I read many, many years ago.  This memory came from reading about Pharrell Williams losing a $7 million law suite for copyright infringement.  That apparently isn’t enough for Marvin Gaye’s family.  They are now looking for more low hanging fruit to pick.

Back in 1982, Spider Robinson wrote a Hugo Award winning short store entitled Melancholy Elephants.  He looked at what was happening then and, as all good Science Fiction writers, looked at potential impacts on humanity and the future.   Re-reading the story was fun, as it also talked about Google cars and other trends.

However, the story’s message hasn’t changed and it still left me Melancholy.

Here is a quote from the story; “Thanks to our technology, better than half of us have no meaningful work to do; fifty-four percent of our population is entered on the tax rolls as artists.” 

Because of new, improving technologies, we are currently moving in that direction.  How will we deal with the fruits of that change?  We, as a nation and a people, need to think about the long term, global impacts of our day to day decisions. Will the result of your actions be positive in the long run?  And, please remember to always check to ensure that your decisions humane.

We need to look at our decisions and our actions from a long term, non-personal perspective, for the good of our cities, our nation, our world.