Once upon a time, it took 90% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population.

Today, it takes 2% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population - freeing the other 88% to pursue other, more lofty goals, such as "Instagram Model" or "Net Influencer".

Picking berries or being a "net influencer"? Where is our time really more well-spent?

With those options then Net influencer or Instagram model surely? When the task of picking berries can be automated the manual labor should be shifted to other activities.

Naturally one might argue that it would be better for society where it so that people put in their hours into other fields than those that seek to profit on people's vanity.

However, when the option is what would essentially be meaningless work when compared to a machine performing the same task, then for me at least I would prefer people to be Net influencers or Instagram models.

If only we could automate the attribute of "being a human". Alas, as I often say, "as long as humans exist, there will be a demand for other humans to explain things to them". Thus a machine picks the berries while a human explains their feelings about the berries.

Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?

Have you picked berries for hours on end? It's terrible work.

Have you ever had to put 45 cases of cans on a shelf in an hour? Sorry for the "what about ism". There are some jobs that I wish automation would take, since they are so thankless.

I feel like both of our points are valid :)

Yeah, and one of them should berry picking, because it sucks to do.