It's not extremes. Modern society is designed so that we don't have to do any of those things (in extreme or even in between), we just throw money (that we generated doing one specific job) at our problems.
Related to this is the phenomenon of turning everything into service. Why would you own things and accept responsibility for maintaining them, if you could just throw money at the service provider and have the thing be present when it's needed? Of course the thing will be extremely limited in what you can do with it, subject to Terms&Conditions, but why would you want to do anything non-standard with stuff? There's always another service you can throw money at to solve the same problem.
What's the end-game here? That we specialize into sub-species of humans, forever stuck in one role, with zero autonomy? No longer building wealth, we'll only be allocating the flow of money - from what Society gives us in reward for our work, straight to Services of said Society? Will we become specialized cells of the meta-multicellular organism Society becomes?
I can see how we're on the path towards that reality, and I absolutely hate it.
A couple of million years without advancing is hyperbole to the extreme; specialization which you are touting has only existed for 100-150 years or so (see Foucault, Frankfurt school etc...).
/Collaboration/ has been a hallmark of civilization; but it is revisionist to say that we have always specialized to this extreme or seen it as a necessary goal. For example, the blacksmith of feudal society didn’t only make spoons, nor the farmer a single crop. If we want to critique previous civilizations; we even need to be wary of the fact that such systems were determined primarily through morality, such as /Plato’s Republic/ or /Confucianism/ rather than any ideal of prosperity. The farmer was a farmer because that was his/her place not because they were better or worse at it.
Even if I’m being charitable and equate division-of-labour to specialization; which, I think is a /huge/ leap — it does not counter the original point which is there is little autonomy in what you choose to do for a living in the logical conclusion of a system where you must specialize to compete.
1) Specialization leads to more autonomy
2) Extreme specialization is as "old as civilization"
3) Extreme specialization leading directly to prosperity as an idea is older than the 18th century
On 1) I don’t see any further arguments on your side; so I assume that you have no qualms with such a correction. On 2) I believe that I’ve adequately addressed your concerns — I acknowledge /Plato/ specifically in my reply as shown in your link and my critique on "Ancient theories" is covered in a previous post. The last point overlaps with the 2nd point and I have found no criticisms to the contrary in your answers.
On semantics and pendantry of terms I’m disinterested — we could debate all day and I could argue that the very term "Division of Labour" originated in Adam Smith’s work [1] and therefore isn’t the same as specialization. Such a debate would neither be useful nor productive.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/division%20of%20l...
Exactly. That's why it makes a lot of sense to study/learn things outside your area of expertise, and/or if you want to lean on the more extreme side, study/learn basic survival skills (that everyone used to know before the agricultural revolution).
I think it's crazy that some people don't cook. Like every house and apartment comes with a kitchen, what do you mean you don't use it? "It's so much cheaper" I say ignoring the fact that I'm a cooking and baking enthusiast and so I'm not counting the fact that if I valued my time at any reasonable rate it's really not.
It's the same thing in the woodworking community -- "you'll save so much money, anything you see in the store I can make half as good, for twice the price!"
Traditionally in urban areas most people actually purchased food instead of making it, because most people did not have kitchens.
You can kind of still see that today; many old New York tenements have been converted into apartments with "kitchens", but really this usually describes something about the size of an airplane bathroom with a stove, a fridge and 1 counter.