It’s hard to know what this is in reference to, but I’m assuming you’re saying you agree with me when I say that science has done a lot of things that are good.
(This doesn’t really counter my claim that science has also done bad things - stuff like chemical weapons, which is pretty obvious.)
I hope so too, but I think that at this point we will have to work to make it happen. Science is a very great tool, but it’s only a tool - to ensure that tools are wielded correctly, we need a politics that builds equality and distributes goods equally to all.
It's bizarre to me how many people in the comments here seem to think that automation is going to translate into more freedom for the working class.
When has that ever panned out? How much leisure time do you have, after years of these "innovations"? We are Charlie Brown trying to kick the football
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“And he spake unto them saying, lock thine sheets, lest some dumbass overwrite thine formulae, which thou hadst copypasted from a website now long-forgotten. This shall be the first law of Excel Church.”
(And - as a statistical database programmer who watched machine learning tech go from an arcane part of my job to something that has caused dozens of suicides in the US - I have become extremely skeptical of the tech industry and its ability to distribute wealth in a way that benefits everyone.)
And yet people generally seem less happy with the political system than they’ve been in a long time. Some of that is myopia, certainly; you’re right, it’s easy to forget the things scientific advances have given us. But I don’t think the people who are unhappy with our politics are entirely wrong.
I like living as a decadent Albuquerque bisexual in 2026. That’s just my thing. But I look around at my communities and see a lot of suffering, and it is not being alleviated by scientific advancement. Science is only a tool. It has to be used correctly to benefit everyone.
(That’s my point: technological advancement, in itself a good, unfortunately didn’t solve our political problems - which is why there’s still a lot of suffering in the world, suffering that is currently growing. Hence, it’s not just necessary to advance science. We have to deploy science correctly.)
It clearly has not solved our political problems, unfortunately.
Automation is definitely good! So why hasn’t it caused any advances that you can point to in the past fifty years?
There are many things that are fundamentally good that are used wrongly in the world. That’s the point. Scientific advancement is good, but it has also led to things that are very bad.
I have a weird thing where I try not to comment on stuff that I regard as clickbait unless I’ve looked at it, clickbait though it may be.
Probably that’s dumb of me, though.
Have you ever stopped to think about why this hasn’t happened yet, and why previous waves of automation did not in fact end the 40-hour work week?
Probably we just haven’t automated enough yet. I’m sure we’ll get to a point where they’ll let us quit our jobs and give us some kind of basic income.
If you believe that all - or even most - of the probably ten million agriculture and agriculture-adjacent workers in the United States are owners of “hobby farms,” then I don’t know what to say about this.
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She shoulda been president
look, it was weird for me to muse on that, but it’s also weird to insist that an article is anti-automation when it patently isn’t
This is obviously false.
Yesterday at 3:30pm, Donald Trump promised the Iran war was almost over, and the market rallied - because dumb finance people believed him.
When a finance person clearly lacks basic historic economic knowledge - we can assume that they are one of those dumb finance people.
working at the worst tech company in 2007, sighing and logging on to Second Life so I can file some reports
Every Steely Dan song protagonist
The assumption that any resistance to any automation is a flat resistance to all automation ever is not a reasonable assumption.
The reason you believed this, I would warrant, is the post you read about the article - since it’s clear you hadn’t read the actual article before commenting.
That’s rich, when you were the one sealioning in support of a rapacious tech industry that is not even remotely interested in the livelihoods of the millions of people who work in agriculture in the United States - most of whom are emphatically not in the “smallholder gentry.”
But assuming that all of them can is silly, especially in a world where new technologies are currently being leveraged specifically to put people out of work.
This is clearly false, historically speaking - and it’s a cornerstone of the Lost Cause myth: that slavery would naturally have gone away, so the Civil War was stupid.
But we HAD to fight the Civil War, because even with tech - and even with the slow death of plantations - slavery wasn’t ending.
The post does not say that!
huh. a farm in South Africa… is he a Boer? lately Boers seem really into tech astroturfing - and this post is obvious tech astroturfing - ie takes a complex agricultural issue and loudly insists it’s about the history of mechanized farming so people will sympathize with the rapacious tech industry
Because they’re not an idiot. Read the article. They’re not against automation; they’re against corporate ownership and control of automation destroying employment and probably starving the workers of an entire industry.
Why would you support putting people out of work?
THE ARTICLE DOES NOT SAY THAT AUTOMATED FARMING IS BAD.
Note that by “you people,” Mr Walsh here means “farmers who object to being screwed by tech firms.” Mr Walsh is claiming that, by being wary of automation, farmers who object to tech firms trying to destroy their livelihood are saying that they prefer subsistence farming.
This is a bad argument.
As a person who is not an idiot and is aware of current events, I have to accept that profiteering is not something we can keep accepting and survive.
