this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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The problem is that we suck at allocating productivity. For example, we produce enough food for everyone but don't distribute it half as well as we should, so people still starve while food rots somewhere else. We waste resources propping up a whole host of parasites that add no value to society, such as famous-for-being-famous celebrities, advertisers, speculators and redundant managers, while underpaying the people who actually produce wealth. And we want a brand new iPhone every year, a brand new car every two years, etc, and by and large don't recycle. We're wasteful.
Most of the actually important and time-consuming work is automated already. If we were smart about what work we do, an 8-hour work week for everyone would be more than possible. But we are so inefficient with our productivity due to warped priorities that most of us barely scrape by as it is.
Our excessive lack of proper planning and foresight really gets accentuated when you evaluate how wasteful and inefficient any of our processes are. I’ve been listening to Walden on audiobook recently, it’s almost as if Thoreau really did transcend his time and saw that the future would be equally as futile as his present at properly providing for humanity in a meaningful way.
We would rather have luxuries and pleasures than fulfilling proper needs, work tends to take away from our needs in ways we overlook.
It isn't exactly like sprinkling magic dust. I do this for a living. Earlier this year I was visiting my inlaws in the developing nation and one of their farms I just had to toss my hands in the air. It would take so much money and skilled labor to get that place even to a basic level of automation.
Electricity is unreliable so they would need backup systems. City water pressure was too low and also unreliable so they will need a water tower. Plumbing and irrigation would have to be run. Right now it is them visiting every day and using hoses. You can forget about automatic planting and harvesting stuff because who exactly is going to fix it when it breaks down? Where would they get spare parts?
When you see a factory humming away you aren't seeing the decades of work it took to get to that point at that site or the venture capital or the legions of support people for failures or the logistics network for replacing broken parts.