Combustion Kevin said:
Inevitably, yes.
However, if being lazy in some ways allows to invest more of that energy into something else, that may just be for the better, it's called progress!
For example, better farming technology made us super lazy about making our own food, which allowed us to invest that time and energy into things like metallurgy instead.
I don't get this argument.
I mean humans are provably working more hours ... and how is it lazy to have a portion of the population dedicated to sowing crops to, I don't know, slaving over a burger grill for minimum pay that guarantees you'll die poor and can't afford a decent roof over your head? As opposed to farmers prior mechanization only had to really work hard 5 months of the year and all the farm hands could afford a roof, a family, and the necessities of life?
I mean, sure ... the tractor means you as the landowner don't need additional farmhands ... but then again, those farmhands suddenly have to do something else less productive, less necessary, and thus less valued. Like data entry. Not all those farmhands can become engineers, scientists, research aids, etc. Even if they did/could, it would still mean most of them would be out of work in these 'higher duties'...
Autonomous A.I. and automation won't mean everybody can become a computer scientist because technology is about Taylorism, not about the redirection of effort ... but people will still need to eat.
Begging to survive on a street corner, trying to huddle yourself against the cold, is not 'lazy'. There's a reason 30's Australia was considered a time of hardship, not slothfulness.
In Australia, prior the Great War... you being a station hand meant 6 months of hard work until you were roughly 50 and then light duties. The station master would gusrantee you a house for you and your wife and kids. Guarantee you food. Guarantee levity money. Guarantee education of your kids... And you were guaranteed gainful employment, even if injured and your duties needed to be changed.
Just how many jobs will offer that security for menial labour 6 months of the year? What sort of white collar jobs will, also?
I mean there's zero conjecture that Taylorism is making the grand majority of us poorer despite doing the same or greater work volumes. So much so I have made way more money compared to effort investing in the market than I did off the back of 5 years of university education. And I wasn't being paid dreadfully, either, with those two degrees.
But pretending if everyone did what I did wouldn't lead to some societal collapse is dreaming, also. I make money based on people's moods about the market and the interdependent systems of consumption. That consumption will always require human energy that someone can barter for goods. But what happens when the means of production no longer facilitate the human necessity to barter their energies to survive?
Either you give the means of production back to people... or they will be 'lazy' as they die in the cold of Winter in some grimy alleyway somewhere.
No one is really safe from the march of technology. Even all those people who study robotics now. If robotics becomes one of the few means to get ahead, then expect greater competition, bidding lower than you, in that field. Taylorism is to the majority of humanity what FOREX is to anybody without Deutsche Bank supercomputers... a zero sum game of gambling with the value of your labour and eternally diminishing returns on human energy....
Not about making you 'lazy'.
