When you get the machine to push the button for you, you can run the whole factory with one guy who only has to walk by every now and again to make sure the whole thing isn't on fire, and the machine is still doing its job.
And even that you can outsource to a machine.
There's a 365T on this topic somewhere, but I can't remember enough detail to know what to search for.
Well, it's sort of the whole point of the arch of the history of technological progress.
I remember one argument I had about tech trees where I had a lot of trouble drilling this home to people, but it goes like this:
In the time before written histories, the typical peasant lived pretty much the same life they lived all the way up to the 17th century. That is, one peasant worked a field of 5 acres. Granted, earlier on, they only worked about 3 acres, until they could get slightly better tools that made working the farm easier, around the time of the ancient Egyptians, but basically, throughout all of history, around 90% of the population was doing just that: working 5 acres of farm. (Exceptions of course to shepherd cultures, but those were even less changing with time than the farming cultures.)
They could have improved agricultural yield with metal tools like steel plows, but steel was too expensive and rare to supply to most of the populace, so instead, they used wooden plows and oxes to plow the soil, and they could only work 5 acres. This is because giving those average humans a greater share of the products of work was impossible - they just couldn't find a way to produce those metal goods for everyone unless they got everyone to do it themselves. On the grand macroeconomic scale, it didn't matter if you were caveman, roman, dark ages peasant, middle ages peasant, Native American, or citizen of some great European empire during the age of exploration - the amount of goods in your life was always the same - what you and your family could produce for yourselves by hand, or maybe trade for from a little side business.
If you look at a graph of human productivity, it's basically a flat line all the way to the 18th century. Why? Because human productivity was directly tied to the number of humans and their animals alive to do work. Both took food. Food took arable land and people working that land - 90% of the people working that land. Therefore, the amount of human productivity could never exceed the amount of arable land under the plow times the productive yield of that land.
Therefore, human productivity could go up very, very slightly through techniques like the printing press where humans found a way to make their tools slightly better, but they still, fundamentally, were based upon human power. And as long as it was based upon human power, it could never exceed human population.
This only
EVER[/b] changed with the introduction of steam power. Now, you have the ability to make the machine do the work for the lazy human. The lazy human can make the machine do the work for them, while they just pull the lever. Then, they can make the machine pull the lever for them, and they just have to watch the machine. Then, they can make another machine watch that machine, and you just have to have a human watch the machines watching the hundreds of other machines. Now, one human is doing the work that once took tens of thousands of humans to do.
Now, you can produce ten thousand times as much product from ten thousand times as much work from a single human being.
Now, on the grand macroeconomic scale, we have the actual capacity to produce far, far, more than we ever could
per human, and that means we have the capacity to distribute to those humans not just enough food to ensure they aren't going to go hungry, but all sorts of wastefully unnecessary goods. In fact, we produce so much we have to invent a culture of excess just to buy all the goods and then throw them away just to justify having all the productivity we do.
We now have - for the ONLY time in human history - the utter fluke of a perspective that technology always inherently advances, and that is a good thing, instead of the classical fear of technology and knowledge. This is because our economic model is based upon eternal growth of demand. Therefore, we have to constantly innovate new ways to supply that demand and new ways to make people demand more things they don't really need.
Now, we are approaching The Singularity. The point where we have not just made the machine do the work for us, but the machine thinks for us, too. The Singularity is the point where we make self-evolving AIs, which is to say, we make the machines so advanced that we make the machines make the machines better at pushing the button for us.
It's called The Singularity because it is the point beyond which we cannot predict anything. Once we have outsourced the job of finding better ways to be lazy to the machines, as well, it inherently means we are no longer going to understand the ways in which the machines are going to be becoming more advanced, and how they are figuring out faster ways to make other machines that make other machines that make other machines that watch the machines that press the buttons that make the machines do the work for the few redundant humans whose only job left remaining is trying to find a way to justify why they built all that crap in the first place.
So I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
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Topic: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization) (Read 31553 times)