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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

natural has a completely different definition for different groups of people. was it “natural” for european settlers in America to have slaves up until the 18th century? was it “natural” for native Americans to live communally and without the ideas of property rights and ownership brought over by the Europeans? natural is such a vague and loaded term that its nearly meaningless when applied to “us” as human beings

the real key is labor productivity. unless we invent new machines that make us more productive, and re jump start the demand for skilled human labor as we saw during the various industrialization periods of the last 120 years, then we will continue down a path where humans are less and less valued as their skills atrophy and they can be replaced by automated systems or more often cheaper labor doing a decent job at a much lower rate

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> then we will continue down a path where humans are less and less valued as their skills atrophy and they can be replaced by automated systems

Have we started down this path?

Are human less valued than they were 100 years ago? 50 years ago? Based on what?

What I see is that there is plenty more work we’re not even trying to do, because we’re busy with the work we’re doing. Just in climate change-mitigating forestry and mental health services, to pick two, there are a billion jobs each waiting to be done. Programming probably also has a billion jobs available. Even cooking, we could move to a personal chef based food system and that would create a billion jobs.

I see no evidence that there is “less for humans to do” today than there was at times past.

I don’t count wage stagnation as evidence because I believe it’s the result of widespread racketeering.

> What I see is that there is plenty more work we’re not even trying to do, because we’re busy with the work we’re doing. Just in climate change-mitigating forestry and mental health services, to pick two, there are a billion jobs each waiting to be done. Programming probably also has a billion jobs available. Even cooking, we could move to a personal chef based food system and that would create a billion jobs.

There's infinity of jobs waiting to be done. There isn't, and never was, a problem with lack of things for people to do. The problem was and is the lack of things to do for which someone else is willing to pay - which almost always requires that someone else to be able to turn the result they bought into more money for themselves. Mitigating climate change doesn't yield much money to anyone right now, so there aren't many people willing to pay to do it.

> The problem was and is the lack of things to do for which someone else is willing to pay

That’s not even the problem. Basically all businesses get started without enough customers to pay the bills.

I think in all the cases I listed there are implicit clients who could pay for the work.

What’s missing is a way to finance the customer development process. People with that skill tend to work on medium sized opportunities and up, and the labor problem is a group of small opportunities that aren’t worth developing on their own.

You have to develop them in aggregate, which is Hard™️.

I've never understood this argument. Demand goes up when the price goes down and at $0 or even negative wages demand by employers is infinite. There is no guarantee that a job pays enough to get by.

natural (comparative more natural, superlative most natural) 1. That exists and evolved within the confines of an ecosystem. 2. Of or relating to nature. 3. Without artificial additives. 4. As expected; reasonable. ------ mechanical (comparative more mechanical, superlative most mechanical) 1. (now rare) Characteristic of someone who does manual labour for a living; coarse, vulgar. 2. Related to mechanics (the branch of physics that deals with forces acting on mass). 3. Related to mechanics (the design and construction of machines) 4. Done by machine.

(These definitions were sourced from Wiktionary)

I hope these senses of the terms natural and mechanical help with drawing a clear distinction between what is authentically natural and what is not. If you seek further context about the distinction then search out for senses of the terms nature and artificial. Also, in response to the high regard for labor productivity, remember that efficiency can be a force for both creation and destruction.

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