121–130 of 397 posts
Can you provide a link to the comment in footnote one, "many people believe that fishing is what allowed us to develop the brains that we have now" ? I hadn't heard this before.
(that lays out one theory, not sure if it's the same one from the footnote, but it probably is.)
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.
What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?
The Free Market has been faced with this problem countless times, and each time the answer has been "the service sector". First we moved from agriculture to industry until agriculture, previously humanity's main occupation, became a small part of the economy. Now we move from manufacturing to services. It's not even a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a couple of decades now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?
Oh I dunno, learn to read, find out what modern work they find interesting, get an education, &c. Just because somebody is only qualified to do manual labor now doesn't mean they don't have other talents/abilities. I did manual labor for a long time before I made the gamble to jump into software development. I had the luck to see it work out, but society can provide resources to help people move into more fulfilling…
That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines.
It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence of today's software engineering jobs - but it destroyed a lot of jobs in agriculture and textile because you could produce more with a fraction of the labor.
To the point that people would manifest and destroy steam machines accusing them of stealing jobs (see "Luddites").
Let's not forget that what is typically called "industrial revolution" spans over a century and it took a while for the industrial revolution to create a lot of new jobs (approx the second half of the 19th century), and those new jobs were initially very poorly paid.
My theory is that there will come a point where humans are allowed to pursue happiness because the individual humans will no longer be considered a "drain" on a limited system. For this reason alone I've always thought the privatization of energy production in America was a TERRIBLE idea. Of all the cards to hold close, this should have been priority number one.
Anyway, as we approach energy critical mass, more and more humans are being thrown to the wayside. It doesn't have to be this way. If we collectively held a belief that we can achieve limitless energy together, then we could find ways to help those who aren't able to cope with technology still find happiness knowing full well it was a temporary band-aid.
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
Now, on to the Indian construction worker. Their lot is pretty miserable. Anecdotes: there were two or three construction sites (homes and apartment buildings) that I witnessed first hand within a 1 block radius around my home in India in the approximately 10 years when real estate was booming, and I remember at least three severe injuries. They don't wear eye or face protection. There is dust everywhere. Children are usually brought up on the construction site because that's where the workers live. The children are routinely exposed to the same dust as their adult worker-parents. Some times children as young as 6 years old lend their hand in the manual labor.
Now, let's ask this question: If they used more machines, would such terrible conditions continue to exist? The answer is obvious: a big resounding no. There would be fewer employees, higher skilled ones, higher wages, better work practices would follow.
There is a reason we have the Jacquard loom and not a thousand weavers and seamsters and seamstresses.
I would like to look for citations, but even a cursory Google Image search on Indian construction workers (vis a vis, say American construction worker) can show you how egregiously wrong your reasoning is.