[stego-tech]

Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).

> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.

Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?

That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.

To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.

[RHSeeger]

> That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"?

I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity; "creating food" is, but there's lots of ways to do that.

And, honestly, if we _ever_ get to the point where we can fabricate food from raw elements (a la Star Trek), then that will be a little sad, too... but still "creating food".

[Freak_NL]

The replicator in Star Trek doesn't seem plausible to me any more. Flawlessly outputting a cup of Earl Grey?

The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

[wizzwizz4]

And if you phrase your question wrong, you have a chance of triggering a Chain of Thought process that gets stuck in a loop "analysing" some utterly irrelevant part of the problem (here, "why would anyone want to order tea?"), locking up important subsystems of other systems on the network in the process.

[bevr1337]

> Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale

The agricultural practices you hint at only make sense in a boardroom. I'm sure it seems rational or logical, but it's not based in experience or ethics.

> But that's not a foundational discipline of humanity;

It is probably the foundational discipline of humanity. Cultivating and cooking food is what allowed us to do everything since.

[RHSeeger]

> Cultivating and cooking food is what allowed us to do everything since.

To repeat what I said before, more clearly

- Growing and cooking food is currently profitable.

- Growing and cooking food _a certain way_ is not profitable

- Growing and cooking food is a foundational discipline of humanity

- Growing and cooking food _a certain way_ is _not_ a foundational discipline of humanity

You specifically quoted a subset of what I said and called it out as wrong. Which is true, but also irrelevant; because it's not what I said.

[zimzam]

What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society.

Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.

For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.

Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?

https://www.lhf.org/learning-fields/crops/corn/

[mm263]

You are not making an argument you think you are making. We switched from one set of problems to another set of problems that didn't exist before industrial agriculture: soil erosion, pest explosion, entire harvests wiped out by disease because genetic uniformity, which means one pathogen can destroy everything - think Irish potato famine but now it's scientific and modern.

The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.

Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

[ArcTugboat03]

This is an excessively romanticized view of traditional farming. If you look at the astonishing death tolls from famine throughout human history, including in living memory, it is pretty clear why, for all its problems, industrial agriculture is still a far superior approach.

Food security requires food production at levels which demand industrialized agriculture, for better or worse.

[bevr1337]

Maybe a false dichotomy. For ex, modern transportation could have been in service to sustainable agricultural models, providing resiliency between communities.

[mm263]

You are missing the point. The point isn't that the legacy methods of agriculture are unequivocally better. They have their downsides, some of the downsides are pretty severe. The point is that abolishing traditional farming in favour of industrial agriculture yielded unforeseen costs, the ones that were never even hypothesized when we started scaling agriculture. Now with AI and agents, we'll reap those unforeseen costs again. The profits will go into the pockets of the owners, the unforeseen costs (which include the costs of switching from one system to another) will become the society's burden to bear, as it was with industrial-scale agriculture.

[doitLP]

+1 on seeing like a state. But combining small plots into mega farms did create more food. It just did so at the loss of variety and knowledge and local control and ultimately freedom as you say. See enclosing the commons in England in the 18-19th century

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I need to finish seeing like a state and will defer to your expertise, but this raised a question in me: why are we still limping along if our farming techniques are doomed like this? Did we never adapt in recognition of the flaws of monoculture?

[mm263]

We adapted, that's why the pesticide industry is so big. I'm not a great agriculture expert, but from my understanding it's an uphill battle against nature and we are winning for now.

[AngryData]

I find that 38 hours per acre for corn figure a bit inflated as someone who use to plant 2 acres of corn each year using a 1901 corn planter and harvesting it by hand with my father. It never took the two of us more than a day to harvest the entirety of the corn, store it in our corn crib, and bundle all the corn stalks, while working at a fairly leisured pace. Tilling, fertilizing, and planting only took a day and only required one person for the first two, granted we did use a 1940 farmall tractor, but like I said its not like we were working at any real speed trying to get it done as if we needed it to survive. It was just a cheap and easy way to get corn to fatten up a cow or two before slaughter. It is also an absolutely miniscule amount of work compared to the amount of food it produced. Using 1900 corn yields (we didnt actualy weigh our own yields), it was over 3,000 pounds of corn, and it was likely much higher growing a more modern variety. Going by bulk grain corn prices at the local Tractor Supply the value rivals or exceeds the average local wage, and if it was sweet corn would surpass local wages multiple times over, so doesn't seem like a bad deal at all.

[stego-tech]

I was directly replying to the poster above me's own arguments in favor of "doing nothing". At no time did I denigrate inexpensive food, only highlighted that their own perspective that food production is unprofitable when it is in fact necessary for every human to survive, should horrify them.

That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.

[kevmo314]

> are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains

Sure, I can believe that, but...

> doing anything of value for their own self-preservation

Even your own comment relies on some metric of value.

I agree that profit motives are not an ideal metric of value but as your comment suggests, we as a species do rely on some metric of value. I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.

[sundaeofshock]

If we don’t figure out a way to keep people alive and relatively happy, the metric may become pitchforks per angry mob.

I used to wonder if a Butlerian Jihad was plausible or just an interesting plot device. Now, it seems more plausible every day.

[kevmo314]

Yeah that's totally possible but I suspect if AI really does take over software, the number of people who will riot over software quality is going to be dwarfed by the number of people who are happier that they can get their chats GPT'd faster.

[sundaeofshock]

What makes you think that capitalists will stop with software developers? If AI can truly eliminate software jobs, then most knowledge based jobs will be at risk of elimination.

Let’s be honest; capital wants to eliminate all labor, and damn the consequences. People are not going to willingly give up lives of comfort for abject squalor. This will not go well.

[kevmo314]

I don't think they will but I also don't think abject squalor is the way to describe artisanal work.

On top of that, I agree that capitalists continue to eliminate jobs but I also think they create jobs in other sectors. The reason I don't buy into doomsday scenarios is I don't believe they will eliminate all the jobs at once.

I only happen to be a software engineer. If I was born 250 years ago, I'm sure I would've found a creative innovation outlet through another industry.

[int_19h]

The long-term promise of AI is that every job can be automated at scale. This is very different from past industrial advancements in technology.

As for artisans, they'll do fine, but the point is that it's a much smaller niche, so very few people who have jobs today will be the lucky ones to squeeze into it.

[stego-tech]

> I'm not infuriated until there's a better metric.

That attitude is the equivalent of a frog in a boiling pot going, "I won't leave until you have a better idea of where to go."

Value is - and always will be - subjective. Whenever society forms a centralized definition of value, it is immediately gamed and exploited by those who seek profit and power. Currency and profit are extreme forms of Goodhart's Law, the civilizational equivalent to "Tickets Closed" or "Lines of Code Written" KPIs.

To demand objective measure of subjectivity is to fight a fool's battle.

[kevmo314]

That's fair but not a convincing argument if you're seeking to show that the pot is boiling. I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".

[stego-tech]

> I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me".

Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot.

If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch refusal to confront reality is your problem, but your insistence on harming others so you don't have to confront reality should be criminal.

[kevmo314]

> let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that

Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.

[collingreen]

Life would certainly be easier if we could all choose which things done by other people affect us and vice versa. Then we could have these simple "if you don't like it, leave" arguments hold water and air pollution wouldn't exist and herd immunity wouldn't be a thing and we wouldn't even need police.