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Comment by ecoponderosa | Hacker News Reader

An exception is small scale local artisanal natural/organic market gardens and family farms that rely on skilled hand labor almost exclusively. You will never and should never consider replacing that with automation and machines. The quality products made available to the public from these operations benefit from the extra attention to detail and experience gained from a lifetime spent in this type of agriculture, sometimes called peasant farming. If you want to know more about peasant sovereignty read the following: Peasant Sovereignty? http://www.independentsciencenews.org/environment/peasant-so... By Evaggelos Vallianatos See also: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture Permaculture

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I would take the opposite perspective - I would think that artisanal/organic gardening, in particular would benefit from automation. Automation will give us the ability to spend significant periods of time on each specific piece of produce, in a way that no human being ever could. In particular, with organic gardening, you can completely eliminate the need for insecticides and pesticides AND not rely on inherently insect/pest resistant produce (which can be innately toxic) by growing in clean rooms.

The key reasons to automate, is it allows us to make this type of food available to masses for fractions of the cost of what it would take for a human to grow it.

I'm now visualizing a micro drone that flies around and harpoons insects. Thank you for that.

Skilled artisanal work is by definition not low paid menial work.

There's nothing wrong with people doing low paid work. Those of us who can't stand it impose our values on others. I worked a lot of manual labor while studying. I worked on mowing crews who spend their lives mowing the same pieces of grass over and over. You'd think they hate it but they were happy to work a low stress, secure job and just do their hobbies in their off time, whether coaching kids or building model railways. Of course that's not everyone but it's wrong to pretend we can walk in everyone's shoes.

Low paid work in some countries may be fine - but in the United States it means that you won't have access to a high quality of health care and will not have quality legal representation (which is important, because if you are impoverished, you are more likely to be imprisoned); hell - you might even have trouble posting bail.

You will have difficultly securing quality education for your children, either because you can't afford private schools, or because you can't afford to live in a location where the public schools are of high quality.

You also are likely to be living pay-check to pay-check (sometimes even less, with pay-check lenders taking their vig), and only a small health-emergency away from becoming bankrupt, and quite possibly homeless.

So, no - I think there's a lot wrong with people doing low paid work. It might be okay for the young, or students, or the retired, but for most adults, low-paid menial work on a prolonged basis in the United States is a financial and personal disaster.

As long as that US system of inequality exists, I suggest we work hard to automate, eliminate, and as quickly as possible banish labor for adults that won't secure them a reasonable living for them and their household. Educate, Train, and move them up the feeding chain to something more sustainable.

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