Academia in New Zealand's always had a bit of a public perception problem. Because credential inflation came very late to New Zealand, a large number of very talented people have been successful without having bothered to go to university. They're sceptical about whether universities add much value.
The New Zealand press yesterday gave extensive coverage to research from the University of Victoria at Wellington predicting that, by 2050, we'll have extensive robot-based sex tourism, and it'll be based in Amsterdam. Here's the original paper.
At first I'd thought the least plausible prognostication is that customers would be paying €10,000 for a robot brothel experience, but the fault was in the reporting rather than in the original article. The press reported €10,000 as the typical price paid by tourists: wholly implausible absent massive inflation or really pernicious turns in patent law. But the original article says it's the price at the "top" club for business travellers. It's not nuts to think the Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Max Mosley of the future would pay those kinds of prices. Otherwise, the price seemed more likely to be on par with the cost of buying a robot, not the cost of renting one.
They reckon dangerous STDs are going to be a big push for robot-sex. I'd expect cheap personal tricorders would let customers and workers sort out really quickly whether STDs are an issue. The only thing that would stop this would be masking agents deliberately taken to avoid STD detection, but it's also pretty plausible that there would be reasonably strong criminal penalties attached to using masking agents. And, it would then just be an arms-race with the tricorders. Once we've worked out tricorders, we probably wind up with an STD segregation equilibrium in dating and sex markets. I can buy improved services as a demand-based reason for the shift; I'd be very surprised if it were STD worries.
I should probably leave it there.
I think you mean Victoria University of Wellington. The university is in Wellington and named after someone called Victoria. It's not a Wellington branch of the University of Victoria.
ReplyDeleteVic needs a simpler name. Henceforth, I will call it Sex Robot University.
DeleteDoes that make Canterbury the Shoes and Handbags University?
DeleteI suppose it does! Ah, too funny.
DeleteThe top end of that scale was 70 pairs? Bizarre. I have it on excellent spousal authority that a hundred pairs or so is the average. At least that's what she tells me. Hmm.
DeleteI am very pleased to be an alumnus of Sex Robot University.
DeleteAlthough that doesn't change my view that the Management School has far too much spare time.
Because credential inflation came very late to New Zealand, a large number of very talented people have been successful without having bothered to go to university.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point, I hadn't thought of it that way. A quick look on Wiki shows that of NZ Prime Ministers between 1912 and 1984, as far as I can tell, only three had been to university (Bell, Marshall and Rowling) -- the rest (Massey, Coates, Forbes, Savage, Fraser, Holland, Holyoake, Nash, Kirk and Muldoon) didn't go to university -- in fact, based on their Wiki bios, a number of them didn't go to high school. That must be exceptional in the developed world.
Certainly, New Zealand and Australia both have the Anglospheric suspicion of abstract thought (cf. continental Europe) that exists in both the UK and the US, but also have an extra measure of anti-intellectualism: perhaps a legacy of being frontier societies so remote from the intellectual centres of the world.
It's a hypothesis and it could be wrong. But it seems consistent with the evidence.
DeleteI'm not sure on the frontier societies one though. Didn't the first settlers push damned hard to get the University of New Zealand going very quickly on the establishment of the Canterbury and Otago colonies?
Didn't the first settlers push damned hard to get the University of New Zealand going very quickly on the establishment of the Canterbury and Otago colonies?
DeleteThere could be a South Island/North Island distinction here. Canterbury and Otago were founded by people with some academic background (Anglican Oxonions and Presbyterians influenced by the Scottish enlightenment respectively), whereas the North Island -- especially Auckland -- had a more philistine and commercial character. This may explain why Chch and Dunedin had university colleges well before Auckland and Wellington.
Muldoon studied accounting extramurally. I don't know whether it was through a university or a trade school.
Delete@Kiwi Dave
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, the three PM's out of 13 you say had a university education were a) the only 3 not to win a general election, and b) had the 3 shortest terms in office of the 13.
Good point -- between them, those three were PM for two years and change, and didn't win an election for PM. From what I've been told (it's before my time), being seen as a bit intellectual and aloof counted against Rowling when he was up against Muldoon; I'm not sure if it was a factor in Marshall v. Kirk (that was largely a generational dispute), but it could've. Certainly evidence that NZers seemed to prefer their leaders not-too-educated.
DeleteCertainly evidence that NZers seemed to prefer their leaders not-too-educated.
DeleteI really wanted to say "Well that explains how John Key got in then" here, but I know he is tertiary qualified, even if only with a Commerce degree, so I guess that doesn't really count ;)
Adding to the weight of the evidence, Kiwidave's list of NZ PM's omitted Joseph Ward (probably becuase he was first PM before Massey, but came back after Bell). He also did not have a university education, making that only 3 out of 14.
DeleteLightheartedly back to the topic, I think you might enjoy this escapist read:=})
ReplyDeleteSaturn's Children, by Charles Stross. (London : Orbit, 2008.)
http://christchurch.bibliocommons.com/item/show/609536037_saturns_children
(I can't recommend any of his others - too much descent into fantasy for my taste - but I thought this was a great fun SF book!)
"Freya Nakamachi-47 has some major existential issues. She's the perfect concubine, designed to please her human masters - hardwired to become aroused at the sight mere of a human male. There's just one problem: she came off the production line a year after the human species went extinct. Whatever else she may be, Freya Nakamachi-47 is gloriously obsolete. But the rigid social hierarchy that has risen in the 200 years since the last human died, places beings such as Freya very near the bottom. So when she has a run-in on Venus with a murderous aristocrat, she needs passage off-world in a hurry ? and can't be too fussy about how she pays her way."