Who needs it?

With high youth unemployment across most of Europe and the US, college career advisers must feel just a bit stupid when adjusting margins and adding a few semi-colons to their seniors’ curricula. After all, their advice will be as good as any other, as even graduates with impressive grade point averages and a list of extra curricular activities may find themselves begging for one unpaid internship after another to keep at least their CVs cheery while disappointingly remaining on the parental payroll....Good luck! Study the right thing, study biotechnology, was Fred’s advice recently. True, in the day and age where life-prolonging drugs and machines continue to make millions because our fear of death has been turned into a winning ticket for the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance industries, this may indeed be a good idea. Who cares whether we truly need the stuff, believe in its social benefit, or are interested in contributing to its development! It used to be information technology, now it’s bio tech, next maybe robotics, anything really that gets us away from the humanities. After all, who wants to ponder human output in the arts and literature, who wants to speculate on ethics when one can outsource this to a clean user surface who feeds us only as much as we can stomach. Life, after all, would be so much easier, if it weren’t for us messy humans...