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Comment by efm | Hacker News Reader

The Future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. William Gibson

What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?

The skill tree depends on awful lot on what you care about, and don't assume that western "high tech" solutions are the best, because they're the most complicated.

From a "Built out of locally available resources, with minimum energy, and robust repairability," it's hard to beat a scythe or other similar tool.

And I guarantee a well built scythe will still work, if tolerably cared for, long past the last of our over-complicated tractors rusting in fields because the right software to update the firmware to allow you to start the engine after changing the oil was trying to talk to some server that no longer exists...

Unless you're making this argument. I can't actually tell which way you're arguing for.

Personally I like to imagine that the part of the skill tree that involves software locking based on external servers is a side branch, not the max height of the trunk.

In terms of joules spent per blade of grass cut, a well honed scythe in the hands of a skillful operator is more efficient than mechanized solutions. If you have an area where you already have an abundance of agricultural workers, it might be that scythe is a better solution than having your agriculture sector being dependent on fossil fuels.

"If you already have a bunch of people doing back-breaking labor, do not even think about giving them efficient machines"

Working in the field is difficult, yes, but the western world still hasn't figured out an answer to the question "what happens when we run out of dead dinosaurs[1] to eat?". Until it has, any idea to not exacerbate the problem until we figure it out is, in my mind, a good idea.

[1]: fossil fuels, with poetic license

The world has figured out how to feed the world without the looming threat of starvation common in subsistence farming

"Efficient" in terms of what outputs, for what inputs?

You can't just handwave the term as a synonym for "I think it's better!" - it actually does imply inputs, outputs, and depending on what you want to optimize for, you may get very different results.

If a scythe is genuinely better for the job than a sickle, great!

But in a country without a lot of infrastructure and without modern supply chains, I'm pretty sure a tractor is the wrong solution to the problem. Unless, of course, your problem is "how to burden nations with loans they will never be able to pay back so you can come in and take over."

There are very few, of any, countries without "modern supply chains".

You have to incrementally improve. You can't jump an economic step.

I'd love to have everyone have no labour to do and be served by robots but let them eat cake doesn't work in reality.

You can absolutely jump economic steps. Many countries never got wide deployment of wired telephones, and never will. They skipped right to wide deployment of mobile phones. Many of those same countries skipped right past desktop computers in every home and laptops to replace desktops and have gone straight from limited computer access to the mobile phone replaces desktop computers.

You certainly don't need to hit all the economic steps, but using capital to reduce labor doesn't make sense when labor is much less expensive than capital.

By economic steps I meant you have to generate enough capital to afford tractors. This is a good stepping stone.

Those with excess capital could just, like, give them the tractors.

You could but you might not have enough money to send enough tractors and infrastructure to have as big of an impact. If you were optimising for impact you might find that Scythes are a better return on your investment.

Imagine a farmer in a region that exclusively has manual laborers gets a machine that makes a hundred laborers' already meagerly paid jobs obsolete. You now have a hundred angry unemployed laborers and a prime suspect.

Yes, this is exactly what the Luddites were about (iirc). But you can't just barge in and make people's jobs obsolete. I'm sure even the scythe is seeing resistance because it can make a single person do the work of three others.

That said, something needs to be done to improve quality of life and reduce poverty. There need to be a lot more better paying jobs in the global South, but it seems that only China is willing to invest in e.g. the infrastructure required for that.

>What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?

There used to be an easy answer to this, now it's not politically or morally acceptable to support: colonization. Colonization is what brought modern farming practices (and their accompanying massive yields) as well as the development of the infrastructure needed to support it and other developments.

My guess is that's because people don't like being colonized. "Modern" industrial farming is also depleting the soil, so I'm not sure the jury is out on it actually being "better" than local practices.

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