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> There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientis

> There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid. But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? We need people to grow the food, collect it, distribute it, arrange it on shelves or serve it in restaurants. We need people to build homes (and implicitly the materials that need to be dug up or obtained from somewhere), sell them, renovate them, maintain them. And what about the huge infrastructure that goes around doing all this, the roads, the water treatment plants, the garbage collection? Who's gonna do all that? Oh, right, we have food and shelter, that's enough, I forgot. If the proportion of people who want to do science/progressive stuff is larger than what is sustainable to do all that I was listing above as well, wouldn't you say that becomes a problem?

jahaja 6y ago
What's your point? The amount of people and labour needed to do those things are much much less than it once was. However we've since employed a massive amount of labour to chase profits and producing stuff that aren't necessarily needed, while still maintaining a system of scarcity for essentials.
ben_w 6y ago
From the perspective of someone living in 1400 A.D.? Yes, food gets to us by magic. In 1400, ~80% of the population tilled fields with horses and oxen, planted by hand, sorted the wheat from the chaff themselves before grinding the wheat into flour and baking it in an oven heated by an actual fire running from wood (and other flammables) that they collected themselves. Now we have robots (in the broadest sense of the word) available to assist us with ploughing, sowing, harvesting, transporting, sorting, milking, shelf stacking, ordering, home deliveries, and cooking — the first half of that list is why agriculture is no longer employing 80% of the population. Similar developments are ongoing in all areas, and that progress is the output of the scientists’ labour.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  True, in fact direct agricultural labor accounts for fewer than a million jobs in the U.S. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricultural-workers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricul... One place where technology is struggling to make an impact is in housing. Even ignoring the farcical inflation of land prices in some municipalities, the price of a building itself has not decreased in cost similar to other durable goods. This is in part due to consumer choice 1 bigger buildings 2 better buildings (impoved sealing, more equipment, etc) But also due to other factors 1 inability to replace skilled labor 2 ecological costs 3 increased code requirements
  - jahaja 6y ago
    The profit/investment motive is fundamentally behind the scarcity of affordable housing.
    - pksebben 6y ago
      There's also the "protect-my-pie-ism" that skilled labor unions engage in. We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes, but they're outlawed in a lot of places because of the pipefitters' lobbies. Same goes for a lot of other building codes under the guise of safety - the system is deliberately made inefficient to protect jobs. Personally, I blame the system of incentives created by late-stage capitalism. It's more beneficial to litigate your job to a safe place than to learn a new or more efficient method of accomplishing the same job.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        > We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes Wait, are you saying America uses lead pipes, not PVC or copper?
        pksebben 6y ago
        That is precisely what I am saying. It's not everywhere, but there are places (like NY) where it is illegal according to building codes to use pvc. Because any old schmo can work with pvc (although, the law is written as if it's a safety hazard)
moosey 6y ago
> But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? Yeah, essentially. We need so few people dedicated to this line of work because of the wonderful scientific, technological and logistic discoveries of the past century. The fact that we have people that starve today is a failure of culture and politics and nothing more. With such a rich soil in which to build an advanced society, the fact that we haven't produced the creativity to produce a more advanced society is not exactly alarming. It says more about the human mind and condition than anything else. Uhm, we already do all of that stuff that you mentioned with a tiny subset of the population working on all of it, hence the concept of a 'service' economy. We could replace 'service' with any number of alternative concepts that could advance humanity far more significantly.

jahaja 6y ago

What's your point? The amount of people and labour needed to do those things are much much less than it once was. However we've since employed a massive amount of labour to chase profits and producing stuff that aren't necessarily needed, while still maintaining a system of scarcity for essentials.

ben_w 6y ago

From the perspective of someone living in 1400 A.D.? Yes, food gets to us by magic. In 1400, ~80% of the population tilled fields with horses and oxen, planted by hand, sorted the wheat from the chaff themselves before grinding the wheat into flour and baking it in an oven heated by an actual fire running from wood (and other flammables) that they collected themselves. Now we have robots (in the broadest sense of the word) available to assist us with ploughing, sowing, harvesting, transporting, sorting, milking, shelf stacking, ordering, home deliveries, and cooking — the first half of that list is why agriculture is no longer employing 80% of the population. Similar developments are ongoing in all areas, and that progress is the output of the scientists’ labour.

DubiousPusher 6y ago
True, in fact direct agricultural labor accounts for fewer than a million jobs in the U.S. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricultural-workers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricul... One place where technology is struggling to make an impact is in housing. Even ignoring the farcical inflation of land prices in some municipalities, the price of a building itself has not decreased in cost similar to other durable goods. This is in part due to consumer choice 1 bigger buildings 2 better buildings (impoved sealing, more equipment, etc) But also due to other factors 1 inability to replace skilled labor 2 ecological costs 3 increased code requirements
- jahaja 6y ago
  The profit/investment motive is fundamentally behind the scarcity of affordable housing.
  - pksebben 6y ago
    There's also the "protect-my-pie-ism" that skilled labor unions engage in. We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes, but they're outlawed in a lot of places because of the pipefitters' lobbies. Same goes for a lot of other building codes under the guise of safety - the system is deliberately made inefficient to protect jobs. Personally, I blame the system of incentives created by late-stage capitalism. It's more beneficial to litigate your job to a safe place than to learn a new or more efficient method of accomplishing the same job.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      > We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes Wait, are you saying America uses lead pipes, not PVC or copper?
      - pksebben 6y ago
        That is precisely what I am saying. It's not everywhere, but there are places (like NY) where it is illegal according to building codes to use pvc. Because any old schmo can work with pvc (although, the law is written as if it's a safety hazard)

moosey 6y ago

> But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? Yeah, essentially. We need so few people dedicated to this line of work because of the wonderful scientific, technological and logistic discoveries of the past century. The fact that we have people that starve today is a failure of culture and politics and nothing more. With such a rich soil in which to build an advanced society, the fact that we haven't produced the creativity to produce a more advanced society is not exactly alarming. It says more about the human mind and condition than anything else. Uhm, we already do all of that stuff that you mentioned with a tiny subset of the population working on all of it, hence the concept of a 'service' economy. We could replace 'service' with any number of alternative concepts that could advance humanity far more significantly.