Just some food for thought…

unwise (Score:1, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16, @01:36PM (#23093170)
Eliminating all human labor is unwise and ultimately self-destructive. Delegating “black arts” to highly reproducible mechanical processes goes against esthetics and homogenizes into blandness the infinitely variable human process it replaces.
This is all just shallow thinking to maximize short-term profits. In that sense, it is just plain dumb, albeit in a spectacular bling-blingy sort of way.

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Ah, a luddite. How cute (Score:4, Insightful)
by Moraelin (679338)  on Wednesday April 16, @02:05PM (#23093552) Journal

Ah, a luddite. How cute.

I’ve got news for you. Your standard of living, or that you can afford to spew pretentious words on Slashdot instead of being out in the fields with an ox-drawn plough, is because things like that already happened.

E.g., look at the clothes you wear. There’s been quite the movement against mechanical looms in the 19′th century. In fact, that was _the_ original luddite movement. Turns out that it wasn’t self-destructive or short-term after all. Previously you’d have maybe one set of clothes, total, for a decade. And you’d stitch and patch them when they broke, because it would be too expensive to buy a new set.

E.g., the fact that they’re clean. Previously washing the clothes was a very time-consuming manual process, and it wouldn’t be done anywhere near daily. If you enjoy pulling a clean new t-shirt out of the drawer daily, or a pair of socks, or underwear, or whatever, then roll it around in your head that people used to just wear the same clothes through mud and dirt and whatnot for quite a while.

E.g., if you enjoy a nice office job with a computer, it’s only because agriculture got heavily mechanized and a small number of farmers can feed the rest of society to do better stuff. We used to need 5 peasant families to support a knight. Maybe also add a burgher family, although those were a lot fewer than that actually. Almost three quarters of the population used to be out there ploughing dawn to dusk, just for subsistence, in the good old days of non-mechanized manual labour. By sheer probabilities, chances are that would be your lot in life, if we still were at that point.

E.g., for that matter, read that again: dawn to dusk. Literally, that was how the acre was defined: the surface that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dusk to dawn. That would be your daily schedule, for 6 days a week. Not to keep some cushy office job by putting up with a PHB’s demands for overtime. That would be the _normal_ schedule, and just for subsistence.

E.g., enjoy all that free TV and free content on the internet and whatnot? Well, that too is because society now makes enough of a surplus, that marketing can blow on subsidizing those in exchange for ads. Previously your only entertainment would be the pub, sitting and listening to the same stories around the fire, and maybe a village dance on sundays. Don’t think even books, because those were quite the uber-expensive things before Gutenberg went and made it a “highly reproducible mechanical process”.

Etc, etc, etc.

Turns out that none of that actually made us any poorer. We just end up producing more, and affording to divert more work into entertainment and services.