• axib@beehaw.org
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    21 hours ago

    The technology already exists to create food or other things at scale though without much manual labour so I disagree with that assertion.

    It exists now, but it is complicated to produce and maintain, let alone develop from scratch. I don’t think it can be done by a village of 300 people, even if they have access to all the information they could need and education and all that. Even if they had all the knowledge needed, the infrastructure required to produce it is large and expensive. Maybe a village could specialize in producing tractors, but I don’t think they could also make their own cell phones. And they only need so many tractors for themselves, so what would they do next? Either sell the additional tractors they build to another village, or change their production lines to make something else-- though they may need more tractors suddenly in the future.

    A lot of what you’re saying relies on efficient recycling and automation. Once we have this, then sure maybe a sharing utopia would be possible. But I’m not convinced that we’re close to that. A lot of companies are trying to develop self driving cars, a lot of money stands to be made from that over paying truck drivers/taxis/etc. But it’s hard. Japan is investing a lot in automation because of their aging population causing future labour shortages. We’re making progress but it takes a lot of time, and it’s not clear if it will ever be completely possible. So currently it is basically “dream technology”.

    You assume capitalism always offers more, it doesn’t necessarily and even if it does at the beginning over time it would merely exploit more and more people until they got fed up enough to leave, more people would do that currently if there was any place to go where they didn’t have to be exploited and could live a happy life with all they needed but there isn’t really anywhere like that currently.

    Have you read about the history of the Soviet Union? The number of people fleeing from East to West was significant enough to build a wall to keep them in. Fleeing in the other direction was almost unheard of. I don’t think simply “giving up capitalism” is all that we need to create a better life, I think there still needs to be some way of deciding how to allocate resources that are used for different things. Historically it seems like the answer to that is either having a centralized government make the decisions, or having a capitalist free market do it. Both can be corrupted, make bad decisions, and result in shortages of food and other essentials. Both can cause some polarization of wealth. I don’t think there’s a third option of “everyone just be better”, since once you reach a certain point, it only takes a few people taking advantage of a system to ruin it. I would happily just “be better”, but I don’t have enough faith in others to do the same. I’d only have to observe a few people taking advantage before deciding that the system is doomed and I’d be better off in a different economic system.

    • TehPers@beehaw.org
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      7 hours ago

      I don’t think it can be done by a village of 300 people

      These things take an order of magnitude more companies today to build. Not only could 300 people not build the board inside one of the machines used for manufacturing, but 300 companies of hundreds to thousands of employees couldn’t either. Each component is usually created by one company that specializes in that specific component and only that component because of how complex these things are to manufacture individually.

      For that to work, you’d need villages to specialize in what they produce and export, but then this leads to a completely different kind of society than what you two are discussing here.

    • Lime Buzz (fae/she)@beehaw.org
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      18 hours ago

      I don’t see the point in discussing this any more. You seem utterly convinced that things cannot work any other way, and are comparing a statist history to a non statist future.

      Hope that things get better for you. <3