Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcre | Hacker News Reader

I'll believe it when people don't have to work in order to eat.

In theory... We do have the technology to work _a lot_ less if were just to get by.

And when you think about it, it's rather strange that we are still working the same amount of hours as they did in the early 20th century - given the amount technological progress since.

On the other hand most of the people commenting here are on the clock.

Eating is trivial; charities can feed people for <$1000 per day. Living space is also cheap; the only reason you need more than a 2m * 1m * 1m horizontal cupboard is a combination of government restrictions and psychological factors which are arguably waning. It's really medical care that's the huge elephant in the room IMO. That's the big problem, and the one I haven't yet seen too many projects try to tackle. I have a feeling it'll come in due time, but it'll take more advanced innovations like chemprinting and nanotechnology to get there.

The problem with healthcare is

1. Politics that prevent innovation, i.e. regulation.

2. Disruptive innovations, i.e. innovations that trade quality for cost have negative view by consumers relative to other industries.

Change those ,and tomorrow we can have a serious reduction in costs, and within a decade or two a huge amount of cost reducing innovation.

BTW 1 and 2 can be partially solved by targeting poor countries with disruptive innovations , letting them improve and prove their quality there, and then transfer them to the 1st world.

This is why I feel like farm to plate automation is the core technology that makes the future real. My concern is that people will reject it out of the lack of variety at the start.

>farm to plate automation

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you referring to a specific technology (like Soylent) or just automating the process of growing, harvesting, and distributing food?

The latter, where growing, harvesting, processing and delivery is done through a repeatable automated process.

How much such automation is left to improve? There may still be room for technology proliferation, but at least for staples it may be about as automated as possible: vegetables automatically picked, cut, frozen, bagged on the spot and shipped directly to retail stores; likewise for grains, milk, frozen meals... there's a bottom line cost to growing 2000 calories of food and shipping it N miles to the consumer, and that cost is NOT going to "approach zero". I dunno how far from that bottom line we are, but suspect we're well within an order of magnitude of it.

I agree that there is a massively high rate of automation already employed in the agricultural sector, however much like the difficulty of high speed internet is focused on the last mile, the last mile for food automation is in cooking and delivery in a palatable, healthy and convenient manner.

To those ends, the logistics of food production are massively intensive and account for most of the food waste worldwide, so shrinking the logistics chain alone would significantly reduce costs and improve quality. I am thinking in this regard about the containerized growing systems that are starting to enter the market.

And yet automats are out of style for some reason...

We've reached the first of those points. Theoretical you could survive in a van in an European country on a "basic income" of 600-800 euro's and have a luxurious lifestyle that surpasses most people lifes of 60-70 years ago.

You would have to bend the rules a bit to get that 600-800 euro's but you could also earn it by working 10-20 hours every week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com