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by TaylorAlexander 1682 days ago
> They need to eat after all.

Honestly when I look at the whole equation: we have machines which can produce value for free, but because people need to eat we keep trying to shut the free value machine down...

The obvious solution is that we should make food free. We should automate the hell out of the systems that produce our food, and we should make all of that automation open source so that all extraneous costs can be worked out. I think if we did that, food would be so genuinely cheap to produce we could give it away.

So that's what I am trying to do. I am working on a farming robot, thinking about machines which can produce high volumes of free hot meals from basic ingredients (like the Sikhs do in India[1], but automated), and trying to understand crowd funded engineering to pay for it all.

Like, the idea that we could produce way more value for free and we're stopping that from really happening because people need food? I think we can solve that. We just have to look at things differently.

And we can do the same with rent, and shoes, and clothes. I think the upside is so incredibly high it is worth doing it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdoJroKUwu0

1 comments

As I understand it we don't even have to change farming to achieve that. We have abundant food for the current population size. It's distribution and the global economic system that make it extremely unequally available.
I think automation and open source can help drive prices down further, but it’s true that all of this can be achieved without that. The Sikhs have been doing it for hundreds of years.
Yeah sorry I didn't mean to be down on your idea which I think is pretty great in it's potential to improve things for people equitably.
Thanks! Well it’s good to point out that automation isn’t a silver bullet and humans systems need to change too. But yeah I do think that we can really improve things if we dispense with the idea of work for survival, and we achieve it in part by actually making things cheaper through automation (as opposed to wealth redistribution which becomes a source of endless fighting).