According to one set of data, manufacturing jobs have fallen 22 percent in the past 20 years, but output from manufacturing has risen 77 percent. Similarly, farming jobs have fallen 33 percent, yet farm output has risen 96 percent. This leads into an interesting ponderance, wherein my compassionate liberal side wars with my hardnosed libertarian side.
I think most people can see there is a trend here. We are (going against all known mathematics) able to do more with less. The problem, of course, is that there continue to be *more* of us, as well. So we need fewer people to do the work, yet we have more people. This is an exponential problem, as our industrial efficiency increases and population increases.
Sometime in the future, our speculative writers surmise, we will have no need for money because we will have no shortages. There is no need to ration things (which is all money is good for) if there is more stuff than all of us need collectively. So, how to get to that point? In the United States today, we could actually eliminate money if we wanted to. Of course, this runs into the concept of _redistribution of wealth_ and that, naturally, is anathema to my libertarian side.
Nobody should be compelled to give away things they earned through the sweat of their brow, assuming they did nothing illegal to get those things. Yet, if we assume that we don’t need money, then we would reach a certain point of material accumulation where we’d stop accumulating just because it’s silly. Humanity is fundamentally silly where material goods are concerned.
Conversely, nobody should go hungry when the society as a whole has the means to support everyone in comfort. That’s right, in comfort. We could actually give everyone in this country a comfortable existence if we didn’t have some people hoarding exponentially more than they need or can even use in a lifetime.
So then we run into the next problem: capitalism works. It has proven to be the best, most proven, method for encouraging the ambitious to excel and therefore raise everyone’s standards of living. But capitalism would cease to work if we made money obsolete. Why work harder than the guy next to you if you’ll get no more for it?
Robots. That’s got to be the answer. When we can automate *every* part of our lives, we will have no need for anyone _at all_ to work. That seems to be the only point where we can realistically remove the dog-eat-dog method of technological and sociological improvement.
What say ye?
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In theory, robots and automation might be a great idea. Products would have a higher quality rating once you remove the human factor. Humans make mistakes, machines, carefully monitored, do not. I’ve heard it said in the past, that once humans no longer had to work to earn their daily bread, they would be free to expand their minds and develop their intellect.
However, in practice, what would truly happen? Much invention comes of necessity. People invent things to make their jobs easier. If a robot is doing your job, what is there to invent? Creativity is often the bastard child of stress and pressure. Remove the stress and pressure of our current day to day lives, would creativity still be born? Or would it be aborted in the resultant stale atmosphere?
I think before we can have a revolution of mechanism and machinery, we need to improve humanity as a whole, on several levels, because humans with nothing to do, are quite likely to turn on each other, and religious and politcal warfare might just well explode in new and unforseen ways.
Besides which, I still think we need to thin the herds. Survival of the most adaptively fit you know. 😉