10 ms·

when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete

when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete economically, what's going to happen? simply handing out money might have broader negative unforseen consequences with regard to incentives (witness the prescription oxycontin and heroin epidemic in the rust belt), but of course, doing nothing might be worse.

quickthrower2 8y ago
This would be more of a problem in a developed country, right? Sounds like these people are closer to self sufficiently, i.e. farming, foraging, building a roof for $40 etc. Where as in developed countries, with the cost of housing and without a job it will be tight. We'd need to helicopter some money, taxed from that automation, IMHO.
- ghostcluster 8y ago
  but the social incentives are the problem. my understanding is that a lot of the oxycontin epidemic stems from the lack of purpose many people have in their lives without the identity of a job as a role in society. people collecting disability benefits and developing a drug habit as a way of escaping from it temporarily. if we just broaden the handouts from taxes on the large corporate winners, couldn't that make this problem worse? unless there's something else driving it.
  - jarfil 8y ago
    Having a job is not the only source of purpose there is. Handing out money may not be an incentive to work harder, but it can let those people look for different ways of achieving satisfaction other than just getting high. People with no money tend to think they need to use any money they get ASAP on fast rewards, only when they have enough money to save do they start thinking about saving any at all. Of course this will hardly work to get those already addicted to change their ways overnight, but some long term financial stability can change the worldview of new generations so they plan for their own future instead of living like they were to die tomorrow.
    - ghostcluster 8y ago
      > Handing out money may not be an incentive to work harder, but it can let those people look for different ways of achieving satisfaction other than just getting high. The problem is we already do this in the US, and we've seen the concurrent rise of a new drug epidemic arise alongside it among the same demographic who are receiving disability.
  - Applejinx 8y ago
    People like those writing that headline are the same people telling those on disability benefits that they're shameful sinful people who shouldn't be there: hence, making an escape necessary. Eventually there'll be no truly useful purpose for most people EXCEPT as a functioning market for selecting goods and services, for the benefit of the much smaller percentage that can innovate and run small businesses. Heaping scorn on the majority of people seems like a weird strategy. By far the most effective technique for improving conditions for the small entrepreneur is to dump money into the customer base, even if that customer base won't be making entirely 'good' decisions. Hell, if you don't like them all doing heroin at home in their rooms, build nightclubs. If they are not so broke that they can't come out, they'll start attending your nightclub because there are other things in life besides nodding off on soma.
  - opencl 8y ago
    Please, I live in the rust belt and knew several people that have died from this. None of them were unemployed. The government giving out money has nothing to do with it. People living off disability benefits can't afford heroin anyway, they're lucky if they can afford both rent and food.
    - ghostcluster 8y ago
      They can afford prescription painkillers through medicaire and medicaid. If you set aside your personal anecdote and look at the actual data, it is a real thing that is happening in the US: https://www.propublica.org/article/extreme-use-of-painkillers-and-doctor-shopping-plague-medicare https://www.propublica.org/article/extreme-use-of-painkiller...
      - opencl 8y ago
        You were specifically referring to people with no jobs collecting disability benefits. I certainly agree that people obtaining these drugs when they don't need them through insurance/medicare/medicaid is a problem.
        ghostcluster 8y ago
        medicaid also applies to the working poor, and it has been recently expanded to cover a larger demographic in many states.
        opencl 8y ago
        This isn't a "government giving poor people money" problem, it's a "doctors writing inappropriate prescriptions" problem that is unrelated to the source of funding and clearly happens with private insurance as well. Your post that I was replying to was also very specifically NOT about the working poor, but about jobless people on disability having a "lack of purpose".
- simonh 8y ago
  The problem for these people is pervasive poverty in their society - it's almost impossible for anyone to succeed because there is so little access to capital for anyone. The problem in developed countries is quite different, there's plenty of capital (in comparison) and many of the people with the ability to make effective use of it are already doing so. The unemployed remnant is in a very different pickle. For example in the US there are far more unfilled jobs than there are unemployed people, it's that they are largely in different places and require skills and experience the unemployed don't have. That's a completely different problem to the one in Kenya, say.
  - cousin_it 8y ago
    > far more unfilled jobs than there are unemployed people That can't mean "unfilled jobs at market wage", because jobs at market wage get filled (that's what market wage means). So you're talking about unfilled jobs at below market wage. Of course there'd be tons of those posted. Not sure that comparing it to the number of unemployed people means anything.
    - jon_richards 8y ago
      That's only really true over long time periods. If there are 600k doctor jobs and only 500k doctors, it doesn't matter how much you pay them, you're going to have to wait around 10 years for new students to hear that wages are high and decide to study medicine instead of something else.
      - Noumenon72 8y ago
        That's caused by regulation. There are easily 100,000 people who studied really hard at their nursing degree or pre-med who would make fine GPs if they were allowed to try.
    - simonh 8y ago
      So if all the qualified people for a job are employed, and I want to employ one more, all I have to do is offer more money? All that happens then is that a suitable applicant quits their lesser paid job and takes mine, but at a market level that just shuffles the problem around. There's still an unfilled vacancy. It doesn't matter how much money you offer, the invisible hand of the market can't magically conjure up qualified experienced applicants out of thin air. This is the problem with this kind of blinkered market forces fundamentalism. The market isn't instantaneous, there isn't an endless supply of every product or service depending only on price, to fill every need. The real world is lumpy, and slow, inelastic and constrained.
zeth___ 8y ago
>when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete economically, what's going to happen? The same thing that happened the last time machines replaced most of the labor. Billions will live in misery and want, a few will become so obscenely wealthy they rival most governments, a world war happens when the contradictions between the old powers and new powers can no longer be managed, revolutions happen just about everywhere when the people have nothing left to lose and the rich are hung from the lamp posts. Give it between 10 to 100 years. This isn't a new problem that has a technological solution. It is a sociological problem where the people with the power to solve it are the ones who benefit most from the problem not being solved.
- freeloop10 8y ago
  This idea that the poor will rise up and overthrow the rich doesn't seem viable in the world today. The technology we now have to quell an uprising far outstrips anything we had in the past. Furthermore, the lifestyles of the "poor" today have luxuries that yesterday's rich could only dream about. This results in the poor of today being rather "soft in the belly" compared to the poor of the past. Simply taking away electricity and internet from today's poor people may be enough to quell any uprising that started today.
  - zeth___ 8y ago
    Point per point you're saying what the rich of yesteryear said about their society. The poor overthrowing the rich wasn't viable in 1913 either. Lenin himself said that it would be generations before a revolution could occur. And he was right. If not for WWI a socialist revolution would have been impossible. The poor living better today than they ever had was something the Ancien Regime in France said before the French Revolution. They were right, until a bad string of harvests leading up to the revolution made the point moot. And the poor being too much of a rabble to ever organize themselves is something that every ruling class has said since the dawn of recorded history. Yet bread and circuses did not help the Emperors, each of whom for 300 years died a violent death. So the simple answer is: we're not special. What happened before will happen again, just bigger and worse because we have so much more capability than our ancestors. In 1400 sacking a town would mean a few thousand people raped, killed and sold into slavery, today it would mean millions vaporized and hundreds of millions exposed to radiation, toxic chemicals and biological agents.
int0x80 8y ago
If there is a future where the technology sector rules everything, then the logical thing is that (almost) everyone is onboard on that sector. That sector will be huge and will have many segments and specializations. In other words, people will need to adapt. The ones who take the risk to jump onboard before the ruling is (100%) a reality will have an advantage/lead. There are low skilled technological jobs for the ones that can't study etc. The world moves this way. If you don't adapt you're out.
- chii 8y ago
  > The world moves this way. If you don't adapt you're out. while that's true, this statement hids an assumption that a priviledged person implicitly has that they might not even realize. The really poor do not have an opportunity to adapt, because their existing, extenuating circumstances means they are fighting for mere survival in the short term, and cannot expend any energy/resources to adapt for the longer term. Think education - anyone who's earning minimum wage will be hardpressed to adapt by re-educating. Without the help of a third-party (whether gov't or charity), they cannot but continue to just survive on their minimum wage, and then one day, get pushed out of even that job.
  - int0x80 8y ago
    Yes, I agree. That is a problem. But that is not a new problem. That has nothing to do with technology. In today's world and 100 years ago, there are lots of poor and miserable people. Wars, corruption, explotation. Africa, Asia, South America etc. If you have a crappy life today because you live in Somalia, 50 years on you will still be fucked and not because of technology. That is a higher level problem. A sociologial/political one. It is a very complex problem that has always been there. I would even argue that technology and globalization gives this helpless people more opportinities. This days, for a stupid example, you can have a youtube channel/whatever and given the free resources online you can produce content and have a chance at making some money that wasn't posible 15 years ago. The entry barrier is much lower. E: The same goes for studing. 20/30 years ago, the best case scenario was studing a degree in a US university with a good status and all. If you couldn't, your best chance was getting a degree in whatever university was near you. If you still couldn't do that, you where out of luck. Now? It's still better to go to MIT if you're lucky. But if you can't you have a chance of learning on your own with the internet. And people are doing that. It won't be the same, but is much better than nothing. Of course, there are still people that can't do that because they don't even have electric network (see the recent news about the teacher in Africa using a blackboard to teach MSoffice for example). Again, that is a much deeper problem.
oxide 8y ago
If you think giving money to the poor is why the original OC formulation did a lot of damage in that area, you are willfully or ignorantly discarding several critical elements to support your narrative. Undertreatment of pain is now even worse thanks to prohibition tactics. There is no perfect lock, nor is there a drug with abuse potential unabused by someone, be they rich and famous (Rush Limbaugh really struggled in that Rust belt mansion while his maid was treated like his personal drug mule) or dirt poor living on 400 bucks a month. Some people are functioning addicts. Probably people you interact with and trust. Not every poor person is going to use a hundred dollars on drugs the minute they have it. If you want poor people off drugs, decriminalization and the death of the War on Drugs comes first. Unless you like seeing innoncent folks drop like fucking flies everytime some genius cuts their heroin with fentanyl instead of something inert.
- kombucha2 8y ago
  Case in point: Prince. The man is extremely wealthy and yet succumbs to counterfeit Vicodin laced with Fentanyl.
ralphc 8y ago
When I read this my first thought was how easy it would be to replace the Mechanical Turk team with a neural network trained to distinguish between thatch and tin roofs.
- GoatOfAplomb 8y ago
  This is article is from 2013; neural networks weren't as ubiquitous. I wonder if they've gone in that direction since then.
- opportune 8y ago
  What? Those kinds of tasks on mechanical turk are precisely to gather data to train those kinds of neural networks
stale2002 8y ago
What if what happens is the same exact thing that has happened for the last couples centuries? This is not a new "problem". Work has been automated away for a very long time, and what happens is that someone people lose their job and move in to a DIFFERENT job, but society is massively better off.
DanielBMarkham 8y ago
when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete economically, what's going to happen? For all intents and purposes, we're already here. Farmers are only about 1% of the population, yet they feed us all. Add in house construction and clothing, and there's a very small number of people that provide the rest of us with food, shelter, and housing. That's all we need. The average westerner has thousands of times more resources than required to exist. So this scary future where robots rule the Earth and people don't have to work for basic needs? We're living it. We just found other stuff we like. Stuff like iPods, notebook computers, vacations, stamp collections. Then we make money and trade it around for that stuff. We'll keep automating, fewer and fewer people will be required to provide for our basic needs, and we'll keep coming up with new stuff we like. I don't see any reason that this pattern is going to change.
- matt4077 8y ago
  The fear is that today’s machines actually are smarter than (some) humans and therefore pushing that segment out of the economy for good. In the past, automation freed people previously working below their abilities: many manual laborers who would today be professors of literature, or interior decorators, or whatever. If you now automate the lower rungs of profession, like PR executives, it may no longer work like that. I’m not sure if that idea is right, and I doubt anybody can be. But it is also impossible to deny outright. This time, it could actually be different.
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    I agree. I think a good dose of humility is important. Induction doesn't always work. Simply because it happens over and over again doesn't mean it will happen this time. The turkey loves the farmer and thinks he would never harm him -- until Thanksgiving Day. Then inductive reasoning fails for the turkey :) Having said that, for those of us in developed countries, it's worthy of note just how far away we've come from struggling to provide our basic needs. If you took a poor person today and described their life to somebody from 500 years ago, it would sound like they were kings. To the guy 500 years ago, our modern-day life would be a place where nobody would have to work. Yet we still work. I guess humans are like that.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete economically, what's going to happen? simply handing out money might have broader negative unforseen consequences with regard to incentives (witness the prescription oxycontin and heroin epidemic in the rust belt), but of course, doing nothing might be worse.

quickthrower2 8y ago

This would be more of a problem in a developed country, right? Sounds like these people are closer to self sufficiently, i.e. farming, foraging, building a roof for $40 etc. Where as in developed countries, with the cost of housing and without a job it will be tight. We'd need to helicopter some money, taxed from that automation, IMHO.

ghostcluster 8y ago
but the social incentives are the problem. my understanding is that a lot of the oxycontin epidemic stems from the lack of purpose many people have in their lives without the identity of a job as a role in society. people collecting disability benefits and developing a drug habit as a way of escaping from it temporarily. if we just broaden the handouts from taxes on the large corporate winners, couldn't that make this problem worse? unless there's something else driving it.
- jarfil 8y ago
  Having a job is not the only source of purpose there is. Handing out money may not be an incentive to work harder, but it can let those people look for different ways of achieving satisfaction other than just getting high. People with no money tend to think they need to use any money they get ASAP on fast rewards, only when they have enough money to save do they start thinking about saving any at all. Of course this will hardly work to get those already addicted to change their ways overnight, but some long term financial stability can change the worldview of new generations so they plan for their own future instead of living like they were to die tomorrow.
  - ghostcluster 8y ago
    > Handing out money may not be an incentive to work harder, but it can let those people look for different ways of achieving satisfaction other than just getting high. The problem is we already do this in the US, and we've seen the concurrent rise of a new drug epidemic arise alongside it among the same demographic who are receiving disability.
- Applejinx 8y ago
  People like those writing that headline are the same people telling those on disability benefits that they're shameful sinful people who shouldn't be there: hence, making an escape necessary. Eventually there'll be no truly useful purpose for most people EXCEPT as a functioning market for selecting goods and services, for the benefit of the much smaller percentage that can innovate and run small businesses. Heaping scorn on the majority of people seems like a weird strategy. By far the most effective technique for improving conditions for the small entrepreneur is to dump money into the customer base, even if that customer base won't be making entirely 'good' decisions. Hell, if you don't like them all doing heroin at home in their rooms, build nightclubs. If they are not so broke that they can't come out, they'll start attending your nightclub because there are other things in life besides nodding off on soma.
- opencl 8y ago
  Please, I live in the rust belt and knew several people that have died from this. None of them were unemployed. The government giving out money has nothing to do with it. People living off disability benefits can't afford heroin anyway, they're lucky if they can afford both rent and food.
  - ghostcluster 8y ago
    They can afford prescription painkillers through medicaire and medicaid. If you set aside your personal anecdote and look at the actual data, it is a real thing that is happening in the US: https://www.propublica.org/article/extreme-use-of-painkillers-and-doctor-shopping-plague-medicare https://www.propublica.org/article/extreme-use-of-painkiller...
    - opencl 8y ago
      You were specifically referring to people with no jobs collecting disability benefits. I certainly agree that people obtaining these drugs when they don't need them through insurance/medicare/medicaid is a problem.
      - ghostcluster 8y ago
        medicaid also applies to the working poor, and it has been recently expanded to cover a larger demographic in many states.
        opencl 8y ago
        This isn't a "government giving poor people money" problem, it's a "doctors writing inappropriate prescriptions" problem that is unrelated to the source of funding and clearly happens with private insurance as well. Your post that I was replying to was also very specifically NOT about the working poor, but about jobless people on disability having a "lack of purpose".
simonh 8y ago
The problem for these people is pervasive poverty in their society - it's almost impossible for anyone to succeed because there is so little access to capital for anyone. The problem in developed countries is quite different, there's plenty of capital (in comparison) and many of the people with the ability to make effective use of it are already doing so. The unemployed remnant is in a very different pickle. For example in the US there are far more unfilled jobs than there are unemployed people, it's that they are largely in different places and require skills and experience the unemployed don't have. That's a completely different problem to the one in Kenya, say.
- cousin_it 8y ago
  > far more unfilled jobs than there are unemployed people That can't mean "unfilled jobs at market wage", because jobs at market wage get filled (that's what market wage means). So you're talking about unfilled jobs at below market wage. Of course there'd be tons of those posted. Not sure that comparing it to the number of unemployed people means anything.
  - jon_richards 8y ago
    That's only really true over long time periods. If there are 600k doctor jobs and only 500k doctors, it doesn't matter how much you pay them, you're going to have to wait around 10 years for new students to hear that wages are high and decide to study medicine instead of something else.
    - Noumenon72 8y ago
      That's caused by regulation. There are easily 100,000 people who studied really hard at their nursing degree or pre-med who would make fine GPs if they were allowed to try.
  - simonh 8y ago
    So if all the qualified people for a job are employed, and I want to employ one more, all I have to do is offer more money? All that happens then is that a suitable applicant quits their lesser paid job and takes mine, but at a market level that just shuffles the problem around. There's still an unfilled vacancy. It doesn't matter how much money you offer, the invisible hand of the market can't magically conjure up qualified experienced applicants out of thin air. This is the problem with this kind of blinkered market forces fundamentalism. The market isn't instantaneous, there isn't an endless supply of every product or service depending only on price, to fill every need. The real world is lumpy, and slow, inelastic and constrained.

zeth___ 8y ago

>when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete economically, what's going to happen? The same thing that happened the last time machines replaced most of the labor. Billions will live in misery and want, a few will become so obscenely wealthy they rival most governments, a world war happens when the contradictions between the old powers and new powers can no longer be managed, revolutions happen just about everywhere when the people have nothing left to lose and the rich are hung from the lamp posts. Give it between 10 to 100 years. This isn't a new problem that has a technological solution. It is a sociological problem where the people with the power to solve it are the ones who benefit most from the problem not being solved.

freeloop10 8y ago
This idea that the poor will rise up and overthrow the rich doesn't seem viable in the world today. The technology we now have to quell an uprising far outstrips anything we had in the past. Furthermore, the lifestyles of the "poor" today have luxuries that yesterday's rich could only dream about. This results in the poor of today being rather "soft in the belly" compared to the poor of the past. Simply taking away electricity and internet from today's poor people may be enough to quell any uprising that started today.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  Point per point you're saying what the rich of yesteryear said about their society. The poor overthrowing the rich wasn't viable in 1913 either. Lenin himself said that it would be generations before a revolution could occur. And he was right. If not for WWI a socialist revolution would have been impossible. The poor living better today than they ever had was something the Ancien Regime in France said before the French Revolution. They were right, until a bad string of harvests leading up to the revolution made the point moot. And the poor being too much of a rabble to ever organize themselves is something that every ruling class has said since the dawn of recorded history. Yet bread and circuses did not help the Emperors, each of whom for 300 years died a violent death. So the simple answer is: we're not special. What happened before will happen again, just bigger and worse because we have so much more capability than our ancestors. In 1400 sacking a town would mean a few thousand people raped, killed and sold into slavery, today it would mean millions vaporized and hundreds of millions exposed to radiation, toxic chemicals and biological agents.

int0x80 8y ago

If there is a future where the technology sector rules everything, then the logical thing is that (almost) everyone is onboard on that sector. That sector will be huge and will have many segments and specializations. In other words, people will need to adapt. The ones who take the risk to jump onboard before the ruling is (100%) a reality will have an advantage/lead. There are low skilled technological jobs for the ones that can't study etc. The world moves this way. If you don't adapt you're out.

chii 8y ago
> The world moves this way. If you don't adapt you're out. while that's true, this statement hids an assumption that a priviledged person implicitly has that they might not even realize. The really poor do not have an opportunity to adapt, because their existing, extenuating circumstances means they are fighting for mere survival in the short term, and cannot expend any energy/resources to adapt for the longer term. Think education - anyone who's earning minimum wage will be hardpressed to adapt by re-educating. Without the help of a third-party (whether gov't or charity), they cannot but continue to just survive on their minimum wage, and then one day, get pushed out of even that job.
- int0x80 8y ago
  Yes, I agree. That is a problem. But that is not a new problem. That has nothing to do with technology. In today's world and 100 years ago, there are lots of poor and miserable people. Wars, corruption, explotation. Africa, Asia, South America etc. If you have a crappy life today because you live in Somalia, 50 years on you will still be fucked and not because of technology. That is a higher level problem. A sociologial/political one. It is a very complex problem that has always been there. I would even argue that technology and globalization gives this helpless people more opportinities. This days, for a stupid example, you can have a youtube channel/whatever and given the free resources online you can produce content and have a chance at making some money that wasn't posible 15 years ago. The entry barrier is much lower. E: The same goes for studing. 20/30 years ago, the best case scenario was studing a degree in a US university with a good status and all. If you couldn't, your best chance was getting a degree in whatever university was near you. If you still couldn't do that, you where out of luck. Now? It's still better to go to MIT if you're lucky. But if you can't you have a chance of learning on your own with the internet. And people are doing that. It won't be the same, but is much better than nothing. Of course, there are still people that can't do that because they don't even have electric network (see the recent news about the teacher in Africa using a blackboard to teach MSoffice for example). Again, that is a much deeper problem.

oxide 8y ago

If you think giving money to the poor is why the original OC formulation did a lot of damage in that area, you are willfully or ignorantly discarding several critical elements to support your narrative. Undertreatment of pain is now even worse thanks to prohibition tactics. There is no perfect lock, nor is there a drug with abuse potential unabused by someone, be they rich and famous (Rush Limbaugh really struggled in that Rust belt mansion while his maid was treated like his personal drug mule) or dirt poor living on 400 bucks a month. Some people are functioning addicts. Probably people you interact with and trust. Not every poor person is going to use a hundred dollars on drugs the minute they have it. If you want poor people off drugs, decriminalization and the death of the War on Drugs comes first. Unless you like seeing innoncent folks drop like fucking flies everytime some genius cuts their heroin with fentanyl instead of something inert.

kombucha2 8y ago
Case in point: Prince. The man is extremely wealthy and yet succumbs to counterfeit Vicodin laced with Fentanyl.

ralphc 8y ago

When I read this my first thought was how easy it would be to replace the Mechanical Turk team with a neural network trained to distinguish between thatch and tin roofs.

GoatOfAplomb 8y ago
This is article is from 2013; neural networks weren't as ubiquitous. I wonder if they've gone in that direction since then.
opportune 8y ago
What? Those kinds of tasks on mechanical turk are precisely to gather data to train those kinds of neural networks

stale2002 8y ago

What if what happens is the same exact thing that has happened for the last couples centuries? This is not a new "problem". Work has been automated away for a very long time, and what happens is that someone people lose their job and move in to a DIFFERENT job, but society is massively better off.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

when robotic physical labor and the cognitive tasks capable by automated software eliminates the ability for the bottom 50, 60, 80% of the population to compete economically, what's going to happen? For all intents and purposes, we're already here. Farmers are only about 1% of the population, yet they feed us all. Add in house construction and clothing, and there's a very small number of people that provide the rest of us with food, shelter, and housing. That's all we need. The average westerner has thousands of times more resources than required to exist. So this scary future where robots rule the Earth and people don't have to work for basic needs? We're living it. We just found other stuff we like. Stuff like iPods, notebook computers, vacations, stamp collections. Then we make money and trade it around for that stuff. We'll keep automating, fewer and fewer people will be required to provide for our basic needs, and we'll keep coming up with new stuff we like. I don't see any reason that this pattern is going to change.

matt4077 8y ago
The fear is that today’s machines actually are smarter than (some) humans and therefore pushing that segment out of the economy for good. In the past, automation freed people previously working below their abilities: many manual laborers who would today be professors of literature, or interior decorators, or whatever. If you now automate the lower rungs of profession, like PR executives, it may no longer work like that. I’m not sure if that idea is right, and I doubt anybody can be. But it is also impossible to deny outright. This time, it could actually be different.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  I agree. I think a good dose of humility is important. Induction doesn't always work. Simply because it happens over and over again doesn't mean it will happen this time. The turkey loves the farmer and thinks he would never harm him -- until Thanksgiving Day. Then inductive reasoning fails for the turkey :) Having said that, for those of us in developed countries, it's worthy of note just how far away we've come from struggling to provide our basic needs. If you took a poor person today and described their life to somebody from 500 years ago, it would sound like they were kings. To the guy 500 years ago, our modern-day life would be a place where nobody would have to work. Yet we still work. I guess humans are like that.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]