I'm not saying that things were sunshine and rainbows pre-industrialization, but there's some level of analysis to be done on the durability and value of a handcrafted piece of clothing, the care that goes into maintaining it, the value of a local economy, and the other side where you're forced to buy cheap items that degrade at a far faster rate.
If a town's local businesses are put out by a new walmart's ability to carry low prices, does the town truly come out ahead with those low prices? Or does Walmart simply extract more money from the town than it returns, leaving the town worse off?
Labor has never been to afford so much luxury as the modern day.
That said if you are satisfied with a pre industrial quality of life no one is stopping you from doing zero hours of work and just becoming homeless.
Where does that come from? I see it all the time. It's like there's zero ability to step outside the black and white. Either you must be totally onboard with the current system and not question the negative aspects, or you must live without dignity in the streets.
What I'm saying is we really don't need to be working 40+hrs/week in order to enjoy these advancements. People don't need to be made homeless in order for scientists who research these medicines to be paid peanuts.
Please describe the alternative. "Mass produced garbage" is exactly how we are able to feed the world. It's not some sort of conspiracy, just scarcity.
(Welfare and UBI is still capitalist.)
Consider how you can't really get by in most of America without a car because we designed our cities to require them. It would be a mistake to conclude that, because life is harder in a car-optimized society without a car, society must be better off optimizing for cars.
I shudder to think the direction this is all leading to.
The reason I'm a pessimist is that I mostly see society preserving the status quo. I don't see AI democratizing things and freeing us, because we have fetishized the concepts of work and profit that we can't imagine a society that functions properly without demanding those two things be put above all else.
I don't envision a dystopia or a utopia, I envision a future where AI disenfranchises people who should be taken care of, bolsters profits of the already powerful, and replaces the most fulfilling human pursuits without actually saving people from unfulfilling toil, mostly because society will bend backwards to try to preserve the status quo.
Exactly zero of that unlocked time/value will come back to the workers.
It simply can't work within capitalism. We've seen it before so many times that it's a given. It's a natural conclusion to this.
Textile workers don't get happy when a machine can replace them despite it meaning they won't get injured anymore and this brutal job will get easier. It's objectively a good thing, but because our society ties all our livelihoods to work, they have to hate the machine.
Given how low standards are, executives will layoff swaths of people for a crappy AI very soon. I'm genuinely scared of how our world will cope with that.
True art will be rare and treasured, few artists will be rockstars. Till next fad we can't even see coming again mixes it all up.
But yeah these transitions do make tons of people miserable, losing jobs. Also overall middle class is disappearing, but thats the trend for quite some time. But it always paid off to anticipate what next generation of showels will be.
Nobody stops you from paying $1000 for a shirt made by artisans right now. Do you want to?
> Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity.
It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you.
If you don't do <insert extreme edge case> then your point is invalid. /s. Look, you dont have to pay $1000 for a shirt made by an artisan to get a quality shirt. It can be a bit more expensive, but much cheaper than that. And this can be true while being fair/reasonable to the artisan and also to the person acquiring it.
> It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you.
And what about my decisions? Or your decisions. Or anyone who is reading this's decisions? Surely the person you're replying to isn't some dictator who is deciding everything. It's not just the parent comment then. It's not just "It's you"
> If you don't do <insert extreme edge case> then your point is invalid. /s.
> Look, you dont have to pay $1000 for a shirt made by an artisan to get a quality shirt. It can be a bit more expensive, but much cheaper than that. And this can be true while being fair/reasonable to the artisan and also to the person acquiring it.
In the ideal case, this would be true: Following classical economics, there would be some predictable demand left as you go up the price curve, assuming genuine quality & labour.
However, this doesn't seem to be the case. The existence of low-cost mass-produced options leads to the satiation of demand above that spot of the curve. There still exists demand, but it's weirdly lower than predicted. People can shop down the price curve, but relatively fewer would do the opposite.
Aside from that I do think you make a good point and I'll need to think about it.
That was five years ago, with a recent re-sole this past summer.
This isn't an exaggeration by the way, but the cobbler who did the resole thanked me for bringing him the job, as it was a genuinely enjoyable experience for him. I assume most of his work is repairing suitcases going by the other clientele in the shop.
But sure, exaggerate that to be an artisan you need to be selling 1000 dollar shirts, rather than doing a 100 dollar service that doubles or triples the life of a decently made item.
> It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you.
No. The Republican National Convention cheered the idea of letting the poor and sick just die off in the streets. They cheered. Ron Paul asked "what are we supposed to do? Let our sick and poor just die cold in the streets?" and they cheered.
Jobs are sacred in the U.S. Job creators must be worshipped. Hard-working Americans are the lifeblood of yadda yadda. As soon as you don't have a job: fuck you, scum, you deserve to die in the streets. You are no longer of use to the wealthy, so you do not even have the dignity to sleep on benches or under bridges: they add spikes to any area you might find any comfort. Your children cannot receive an education. You get to disappear from view into some secluded slum until you die of the cold. It's not GP that decided that. It's tens (hundreds?) of millions of Americans who will cheer on your death if you lose your job. Most of which, of course, are a couple paychecks or a major illness away from being homeless themselves. Do not act like that's not a real thing.
The (very clear) point of Dr. Paul's RNC speech was that regular people are better at solving problems than the government. If the government stopped taking tax money to monopolize "helping the poor" (while wasting most of that money on ever ballooning bureaucracy) then churches and other private initiatives would step in to do the job better, and at better value for the money. We wouldn't just let our sick and our poor die in the street, because unlike a faceless bureaucratic machine that inevitably comes to exists only to perpetuate itself and its own power, we are humans who care about other people.
The people at the RNC were cheering for the goodness of regular people, for the fact that Americans give more to charity than any other nation, and for the positive libertarian vision championed by Dr. Paul.
When the government gets in the way, and makes everyone poorer (by excessive taxation and bureaucracy), however, people become colder, and they can always excuse it to themselves by pointing out that the government promised to solve the problem, and they already forced us to pay them to solve it. So now it is the government's responsibility, but a bureaucracy cannot have any feelings of responsibility, because it is a machine and not a human.
This is also what happens in communist countries like China and the USSR before it.
Unfortunately, many people will probably just read deceptive statements like feoren's, and never go listen to the actual speeches. The left loves to dissuade people from actually listening to conservatives. Just see how they are shamelessly lying right now about Trump's "bloodbath", hoping to stir up actual political violence from people who they manage to trick and frighten.
The left is always trying to use 1984 style newspeak to prevent people from having an honest debate, so naturally they talk as if it was an established fact that either a government bureaucracy must continuosly rob Peter to pay Paul, or everyone starves.
This is because the left wants as big and powerful of a state apparatus as possible, because they intend to use it as an army against their political enemies. A recent example of how the left sees the role of the government is Letita James' lawfare against Donald Trump.
Ron Paul's message was that whenever the government tries to "help", it always backfires. Expecting the government to solve social problems, and allowing them to take money from regular people, leads to financial ruin for the country, and it won't even fix the very problems it claims as the reasons why we must give up our freedom and prosperity. In fact it always manages to make the problems worse.
It's forcing the rich to give us UBI that is the problem.
It would be bare minimum to survive, if that. We'd need a complete restructuring of society to even approach dignity via UBI.
Start a local cooperative and build value from the bottom up
I’ve decided the best thing I can do is vote with my wallet (i.e. as a consumer) and vote with my time (i.e. as a producer).
Consume commodities that are regenerative and products that are durable. Whenever possible, buy local to keep cash flows (wealth transfer) local.
Invest your time in contributing to products that encourage other people to do the same.
Yvon Chouniard said (I’m completely paraphrasing) something like “in the 21st century, the most powerful vehicle for transforming the world is the American corporation. Whether or not it should be, it is. If you think the world should be different, step 1 is starting a business”.
As a producer (engineer, for me), the best thing I can do is build tools to help people wean themselves off of Capital.
Buying (food, especially) locally means supporting a robust food chain that’s less dependent on refrigeration, global shipping, and a geographic arbitrage on agricultural labor. It’s better for the environment and connects you to your community and sense of place and seasons.
It means I can know what went into the food, in terms of soil, labor, and pesticides — something that I have no knowledge of at the grocery store.
A pound of apples, meat, or whatever from 1-2 counties away is more financially expensive, but if you can afford it there’s many non-financial benefits.
I’d rather purchase from a CSA than a national grocer, because that money mostly goes back into my local community.
You’re right the money doesn’t disappear when you spend it outside your locality, but it comes back in ways that are increasingly exploitative and/or depressing (chain stores offering no meaningful careers or opportunities for ownership, rent-seeking financialization, warehouses that bring noise pollution and packaging waste, etc.).
Again, if you can afford it, IDK why you wouldn’t prefer to spend the marginal dollar locally (i.e. private / family-owned businesses in a few counties’ radius).
It’s consumer choice and comparative advantage that actually lead people like me to shop locally...
They don't build 'em like they used to, but those of us in the rank and file are getting better off. We can't all be "I think I will just buy Hawaii" rich like Zuckerberg, but quality of life is, overall, improving.
I'm unsure why we default to extremes on that regard. A decent made T-Shirt should cost about $40, but right now the $40 shirt costs $.10 to make. Therein lies the self-consuming nature of how things are going right now.
Price does not necessarily imply quality (branding is much more of a factor).
Even if price did imply quality for certain brands, the question would be how much more qualitative? Will it hold 10x more wash cycles or last 10x longer?
In which case a consumer could make an actually informed decision on quality vs. price.
> we keep destroying what allows humans to seek meaning.
> Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity.
Those points are really interesting to me, I think you're right and I've never looked at it that way before.
Then the majority of us spent our time and energy in factories. That got automated during the Industrial Revolution. So we moved to service and knowledge jobs.
And now we're potentialy seeing the start of automation in those knowledge jobs. Will this be a painful revolution as the Industrial one? Where will we spend our time and energy on next?
> Where will we be in the future?
A German named Karl wrote a book with an answer to that question 150 years ago.
The main issue being, our governments and society have made it clear that the opinions of those who hold Capital are far more important than the unproductive surplus. Our entire society now is based around consuming cheap products we don't need, because the previous cheap products wore out prematurely. The focus on a profit motive tosses aside great discoveries that are unable to turn a profit, while encouraging useless advancements that only degrade our lives.
IE advertisements make money, but I've never met someone who believes their life to be improved by ads, except for a minority of shareholders.
On the other hand, there have been many medical advancements all but scrapped because the lack of profit outweighed the human benefit.
The profit motive is incompatible with a robust society. I won't pretend to have the answers on what should be done and how to implement it, but I know that our current system cannot last forever.
I hope that the current circumstances trigger a renewed interest in thinking about how we organise our society. It would be great if that could be done rationally, without taboos. I don't have high hopes though. The people in power want to stay in power, and any hint at socialistic or communistic ideas are quickly shot down.
Communism as implemented by Soviet Russia was pretty bad and failed, but that doesn't mean that the ideas of Karl Marx are all terrible.
I like the idea of a centrally managed economy but I don't think it's a stable system. There's too much opportunity for abuse by the central power.
I hope we explore the spectrum between extreme capitalism and extreme communism.
Does anyone have any reading recommendations that explore these kinds of economic and societal system?
For example, the "soviet" system was a bottom up democratic system where labor unions effectively formed the foundation. There was a lot of thought into how the system was formed and even the CIA admitted Stalin was more of a team captain than a dictator. Hell you can get a lot of interesting tidbits into declassified reports on the Soviet Union. There's the famous one about how the soviets were better fed than their American counterparts, despite the claims of breadlines.
It's really quite sad that we are basically not allowed to learn from the positive aspects of these projects.
For example, people hate on Stalin a lot, but his 5-year plans were so wildly productive and successful, even a young South Korea deep in a western backed dictatorship copied the idea in order to boot strap their industrial base. China continues to use this idea, the simple method of setting goals in the short, medium, and long term in order to use resources effectively.
you mean productive as in Holodomor?
By all means Op can say that they agree with some Marxist ideas, but when the real human costs of that model are very well proven out by now it should be a red flag if someone doesn’t acknowledge those costs from the jump. I’m not surprised this quickly went to suggesting Stalin wasn’t so bad.
You literally proved my point, One can't say "Stalin's 5-year plans were overall successful and copied by other countries" without "but holodomor". Yet you can say all you want about Churchill or Britain's policies without a smug "Bengal famine" appearing.
Premise is kinda all wrong, but IMO some interesting questions nonetheless are posed at the end of your comment.
First agricultural revolution was farming, that allowed for cities. Second agricultural revolution overlaps with the industrial revolution.
That was the transition from having only bio-mechanical energy available to also mechanical energy (the only source of power was no longer just muscles, but then things like steam power). The industrial revolution ended in the mid 1800s - a full century before the transition to service and knowledge jobs. Still, by the end of the second agricultural revolution, 50% of the labor force are still farmers. The industrial revolution was done decades before manufacturing labor participation peaked (in the US).
The industrial revolution was NOT the shift into factories, it was the advent of steam engine and steam power. You didn't have to pull a cart with a horse anymore, there were steam engines (trains). This is WAY before the model T comes out.
The idea that the majority of laborers hopped (in discrete steps) from farming, to factories, to service jobs is wrong. The percentage shift is smaller and more gradual than would be commonly believed, and plays over relatively long periods of time, most of those time periods playing out over just the last 400 years.
> Long ago most humans spent their time and energy on farming so they wouldn't starve. We automated that with a couple of Agricultural Revolutions.
This statements is misleading to the point of being incorrect.
This resource states there were three major agricultural revolutions [1]
Other resources refer to "The agricultural revolution", which was the second. "The Second Agricultural Revolution was both a contributing factor and consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which took place in the 1700s-1800s. As labor productivity and agricultural technology use increased and the population boomed due to a growing food supply, many people were left without land or work in rural areas. Thus, they migrated to the city, typically to find work in manufacturing." [1]
Note, by 1800 in the US, still 80% of the labor force worked as farmers. [2] Thus, there was a shedding from 80%+ to 80%, and many of those left for other work, namely cities. It's not the case though that the agricultural revolution caused humans to go from 90% farming to 10% farming, with everyone there going into manufacturing - it's much small numbers and much more gradual shift that occurred over a few centuries (notably, just the last 3)
The breakdown:
- first agricultural revolution allowed humans to farm and not be nomadic (12k years ago, I'm still shocked by how relatively recent this was)
- second agricultural revolution leveraged the industrial revolution, where a lot fewer people were needed for farming (but still a large number were required)
- third agriculatural revolution was in the 1900s and lead to much better crop yields
- arguably there is a 4th agricultural revolution underway today. I was talking to a farmer a year ago and they stated how amazing the tractors are now. They literally drive themselves & combine GPS data and automated controls to control the fertilization and watering down to the square foot.
Still today, 20% of the total global population is doing subsistence agriculture. [3] I would guess that a large fraction are still growing their own gardens for food supplementation.
> That got automated during the Industrial Revolution. So we moved to service and knowledge jobs.
"The Industrial Revolution was the transition from creating goods by hand to using machines. Its start and end are widely debated by scholars, but the period generally spanned from about 1760 to 1840" [4]
The industrial revolution is the transition from near exclusive muscle power (humans/oxen/horses) to steam power, machine power. From 1800 to 1860 the percentage of people (in the US) that were farmers went from 80% to 50%. It takes a lot longer before that percentage falls below 20%. The transition to service and knowledge jobs wasn't until the 1960s, that's about 200 years after the industrial revolution.
Still though, I can't find a single resource that shows US manufacturing percentage was ever greater than 30% of the workforce. The resources I find show there was a consistent increase in manufacturing output until essentially the late 1900s (speaking of the the US only), while at the same time there was a reduction in the percentage workforce in manufacturing.
> And now we're potentialy seeing the start of automation in those knowledge jobs.
Potentially is the operative word. "ThePrimeTime" aka "Primeagen" recently did a video on Devin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80MPXoRHvK8 (start at 8:50, until about 9:45 mark)
His assessment, until Devin is 100x more powerful, two orders of magnitude better, only then will Devin even potentially start taking over jobs from humans. I generally agree with that take. I think we get there in maybe 20 to 40 years from now.
Personally, that idea seems similar to me as the idea that cars are imminently about to be self driving and you can lease your self driving car as a taxi during work-hours. That idea was floated by Musk since 2014, and every year since, that was going to be a reality within one year. [5]
--------------------------
I think your last questions though are very interesting, namely these: "Will this be a painful revolution as the Industrial one? Where will we spend our time and energy on next?"
Though, I find your premises to be inaccurate, and your timeline for when this next revolution is off by at least 30 years. It's yet to even start. I'll note we're still living through the automation of the service industry, that revolution is not yet done - computers have not yet eaten the world. As an example, the first successful 'pets.com' is still less than 20 years old, and that is just the act of automating a store-front to purchase cat food - plenty of examples of industries and services that are still largely paper based. A couple years ago I interviewed for a startup that was automating food chain supply, they noted that industry is still almost entirely paper based, and that is in 2021!
[1] https://populationeducation.org/a-timeline-of-the-three-majo...
[2] https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=11...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture
[4] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/industrial...
[5] https://futurism.com/video-elon-musk-promising-self-driving-...
Look at the unemployment rate history. Look at poverty rate history. Your argument is completely nonsense.
Perhaps dignity is seeking value that is scalable to entire humanity, hm? Isn't it dignified? If we cannot find value for fellow humans we can relax I guess?
> We have outsourced art to computers, so people who don't understand art
Ok, I am seeing a lot of bad faith arguments. Just because somebody doesn't have time to learn to craft and cruft of some very tedious discipline, doesn't really mean they don't understand it.
You don't need to throw rocks all day to get an understanding of physics. But people had to do it in the past, now we calculate, simulate and then just do one throw.
Also I am speaking as part time designer/artist. New AI tools are great, I could achieve similar results, but difficult bets were made, when i started. Now I just roll in images, some of them finetuned on my work, some are mix, some are completely nuanced. Many artists after initial sobbing(I was enthusiastic from getgo) started to learn and explore this tools.
People bring amazing things to life, that just were impossible with their limited resources (take a look, anime done with very small crew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWZOEFvczzA).
I much dislike the mindset of "they took our jobs".
For every technological advancement, artisans are the first to be made obsolete.
Sure we have landfills full of unworn textiles, the market says its good, but overall, we keep destroying what allows humans to seek meaning.
Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity.
We have outsourced art to computers, so people who don't understand art can have it at their fingertips.
Now we're outsourcing engineering so those who don't understand it can have it done for cheap.
We hear stories of those who don't understand therapy suggesting AI can be a therapist, of those who don't understand medicine suggesting AI can replace a doctor.
What will be left? Where will we be? Just stranded without dignity or purpose, left to rot when we no longer produce value.
I ask this question often, with multiple contexts, but to what end? Who benefits from these advancements? The CEO and shareholders, sure, but just because something can be found for cheaper, doesn't mean it improves lives. Our clothes barely last a year, our shoes fall apart. Our devices come with pre-destined expiration dates.
Where will we be in the future? Those born into money can continue passing it around, a cargo cult for the numbers going up. But what about everyone else?