• 0 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

help-circle













  • It’s more complex than this, but it’s related to climatic change.

    First, we’re still in the ice age. We’re just in an interglacial period.

    During the glaciation, humans mainly hunted a few big game. It was an inhospitable environment.

    When the glaciation ended, the climate became more stable, warmer, more clement. Rivers rised and became calmer, as the sea level rose.

    Humans started diversifying and broadening what they ate. They collected much more plants, hunted more animal species, notably small game, fished much more. It was the mesolithic.

    In zones that were particularly abundant in resources, probably at the edges of ecozones, it became possible and interesting to settle down somewhat, and defend this territory against outsiders. Owning resources allowed to invest time and labor into making things more productive. Domestication was part of that.

    Not all regions are suitable, or have sufficient domesticable species. Some places took much longer than others to really get farming going, and most never did, until domesticates arrived there from somewhere else.


  • This is a common question in economics.

    It’s called technological unemploymemt and it’s a type of structural unemployment.

    Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.

    An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there’s like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.

    There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.

    Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.

    There’s been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there’s not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.

    Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.

    One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn’t as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.