Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.
Here’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beginning to cross that threshold. It was the sacrifice of our forefathers who brought us there, just as it was the sacrifice of theirs who brought us from dank caves and death in our 30s from curable illness, into the enlightened world.
