I suppose there are a lot of dead Luddites feeling vindicated right now. “We told you so!”
But I really don’t think the human race is worse off for the Industrial Revolution. Now the other shoe is about to drop.
If we’re wise, we’ll let people adapt—as we did with the Industrial Revolution. In the end, that worked out OK. 99% of us used to be farmers, now < 1% are. It turns out there are other things people can be usefully occupied with, beside farming. It was quite impossible to see what those things would be, ahead of time.
Any revolution that increases human productivity—that lets us do more with our 24 hours each day—is in the end a good one.
I suppose there are a lot of dead Luddites feeling vindicated right now. “We told you so!”
But I really don’t think the human race is worse off for the Industrial Revolution. Now the other shoe is about to drop.
If we’re wise, we’ll let people adapt—as we did with the Industrial Revolution. In the end, that worked out OK. 99% of us used to be farmers, now < 1% are. It turns out there are other things people can be usefully occupied with, beside farming. It was quite impossible to see what those things would be, ahead of time.
Any revolution that increases human productivity—that lets us do more with our 24 hours each day—is in the end a good one.
Until it kills us.
Dead people are notably unproductive.
But they are made of atoms which can be rearranged into something even more productive!
(Okay, we still need a few decades of technological progress to get there.)