4 ms·

I guess it's a cultural thing - as a nation of immigrants with low population, once scientific knowledge grew, slavery started to become unpopular and communist

I guess it's a cultural thing - as a nation of immigrants with low population, once scientific knowledge grew, slavery started to become unpopular and communist / socialist ideas started becoming popular with the labour class, Americans increasingly turned to technology to try and replace them or make their work redundant. Thus, the powers to be in the US have an affinity to trusting technology. Most of Europe and Asia especially does not share this enthusiasm and have policies that dictate that humans should be able to override the "machine" at any point.

wolverine876 4y ago
Can you provide any credible sources for this theory?
- webmobdev 4y ago
  No. It's an extrapolation of something one of my history teacher taught in school when teaching us about our colonial history. While early imperialism was about enslaving people for labour and obtaining raw resources from the colony, as the industrial revolution happened the goals changed. With the advent of industrialisation the capitalist-imperialists found a way to reduce dependence on human labour and this was considered a necessity to counter the potential economic might of the colonies in Africa and Asia with huge populations. (And this did give some colonies an edge - for example, at one point in history both India and China were economically richer because of the easy availability of cheap labour). To ensure their economic edge, apart from using industrialisation to reduce the need for human labour by finding machines to replace them, they also used the colonies as a market for their industrialised goods. For this, they also had to destroy the local industries of the colonies (deindustrialisation) that had the advantage of surplus and cheap labour, and thus make colonies importers of their manufactured goods. ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britain-took-more-out-of-india https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britai... ). After the French revolution, and later the Russian revolution, once freed colonies got influenced by socialism and / or communism, it was common to see some socialist or communist parties organising protests against machines or computers that were "stealing" human jobs to "enrich" the capitalists at the expense of human workers. Thus, there is a political history in past colonies to view mechanisation / industrialisation with suspicion and distrust, and the debate on humans vs machines in these countries leans towards humans being "superior".

wolverine876 4y ago

Can you provide any credible sources for this theory?

webmobdev 4y ago
No. It's an extrapolation of something one of my history teacher taught in school when teaching us about our colonial history. While early imperialism was about enslaving people for labour and obtaining raw resources from the colony, as the industrial revolution happened the goals changed. With the advent of industrialisation the capitalist-imperialists found a way to reduce dependence on human labour and this was considered a necessity to counter the potential economic might of the colonies in Africa and Asia with huge populations. (And this did give some colonies an edge - for example, at one point in history both India and China were economically richer because of the easy availability of cheap labour). To ensure their economic edge, apart from using industrialisation to reduce the need for human labour by finding machines to replace them, they also used the colonies as a market for their industrialised goods. For this, they also had to destroy the local industries of the colonies (deindustrialisation) that had the advantage of surplus and cheap labour, and thus make colonies importers of their manufactured goods. ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britain-took-more-out-of-india https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britai... ). After the French revolution, and later the Russian revolution, once freed colonies got influenced by socialism and / or communism, it was common to see some socialist or communist parties organising protests against machines or computers that were "stealing" human jobs to "enrich" the capitalists at the expense of human workers. Thus, there is a political history in past colonies to view mechanisation / industrialisation with suspicion and distrust, and the debate on humans vs machines in these countries leans towards humans being "superior".