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by sandspar
1110 days ago
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I know a plumber who keeps his phone ringer on all night so he can wake up and go on calls. He's in his 30's and his knees are as damaged as an 80 year old man's. Try telling him that automation and technology should be reducing his need to work. Those of us in the Silicon Valley bubble should remember that 99% of the world's population has harder jobs than we do . |
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Instead of us walking down to the stream to drink like our hunter/gatherer forefathers did before us, we create pipes that send water anywhere we wish to settle.
The creation of automated pipes / automated water movement has created an entire industry (plumbing), as people move further and further away from streams. And into deserts even, requiring more and more plumbing to even live.
That's the story of technology. We continuously are depending on more-and-more of it. Be it a modern technology stack like a computer, or a 2500-year-old technology like plumbing / aqueducts.
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The bulk of all jobs today is in the maintenance of this automation. HVAC to automate our air conditions. Plumbing to automate our water. Cookware to automate food preparation (fast foods, chefs, etc. etc.). We don't grind grain ourselves anymore, we use flour that's been processed ahead of time in mass.
And we all specialize upon our particular niche. And around Hacker News, we focus on the most abstract of automations: automation of communications, computers, mathematics. We write programs that send messages faster, simpler, easier through various social networks.
You know, instead of running those messages by hand, or by horse. We have wires that talk to a computer router that talks to a network that... eventually delivers the message.