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   Kerosene (kerosene@bae.st)'s status on Sunday, 28-Jan-2024 01:28:14 JST Kerosene
   I've been thinking (not common)
   
   Advancements in technology make it so very few humans are needed to produce a lot of food and other commodities, so as tech gets progressively better there are fewer people needed to produce the same amounts of products. What would normally happen is that these people would then be freed to spend their time doing other things and specializing in other fields, but as anyone can see nowadays there seems to be an over-abundance of bullshit and unnecessary jobs. Could it be that, although the tendency of technological progress to allow people to get new specialized jobs is true, there's some kind of limited number of "real" jobs out there which we have already passed?
   
   And, what could the solution to that be? Some people have speculated that working hours would get steadily shorter, eventually arriving at something like a 5-hour day, but that's not what has happened. I know there are a million factors contributing to this phenomenom but I'd rather just focus on the effect of technology and if there's really something like a limit to the amount of productive people a society can possibly have, and how that is related to the size of that society.
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     iced depresso (icedquinn@blob.cat)'s status on Sunday, 28-Jan-2024 01:28:12 JST iced depresso

     in reply to
     @Kerosene i think the Jetsons types and workers hoped there would be less work with tech. Smith seemed to nod at that. Although it doesn't really pan out because people aren't really autonomous individuals who are doing work out of a need for the work.
     
     you have feudalist serfs where the work is just there to make the lord wealthy, and the prostant work ethic bullshit venerates work for works sake, leading to our current state (at least in the USA) of being free range serfs. we still just job to make other people wealthy, so as the technology makes that easier they will just press the workers harder. probably why executive dysfunction is such a rocketing problem.
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     iced depresso (icedquinn@blob.cat)'s status on Sunday, 28-Jan-2024 01:35:04 JST iced depresso

     in reply to
     @Kerosene traffic is caused by junctions. :blobcatghostrev:
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     Kerosene (kerosene@bae.st)'s status on Sunday, 28-Jan-2024 01:35:06 JST Kerosene

     in reply to

     • iced depresso
     @icedquinn It's a really interesting and counterintuitive problem, at least for dumb people like me. Reminds me of that paradox that makes traffic worse as you add lanes and expand road capacity. If you approach the problem purely as an engineer then you fail because humans interact with the system and they are weird as fuck.