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Comment by haihaibye | Hacker News Reader

Agriculture continues its long term trend of reducing needed human input. Almost everyone was once a farmer now only a few, and soon even less.

This could shift the skills needed to farm more towards automation/programming tech etc

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One of the most voiced benefits of the increased automation and efficiency through the industrial revolution (and the technological advancements today) was that we'll generate more value/goods/etc. with less human work, therefore everyone's prosperity will increase. For example, a farm that would require 20 people will require 5 with machines.

We did get the increase in production efficiency but that newly-generated value was never passed on to those who did the actual work (all the way from farmers and factory works to most white collar jobs). It was captured and collected by those at the top. So now, everyone's afraid of "losing their jobs to machines" and somewhat rightly so. Instead of building machines to do our bidding while we live like royalty, we still have insane amounts of poverty despite the world generating more products/food/value than ever before in human history, with people losing their jobs and getting nothing in return.

Because the market for agriculture is competitive, the value was passed down to consumers in the form of cheaper food. Before industrialized agriculture, it was normal for food to be the largest chunk of a household's budget.

It's likely also a leading cause of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:W...

Innovators making profits - this is the premium we have to pay for exploration. On the other hand, if we rejected exploration everyone would be worse off. Just take a look at innovation in communist regimes.

I think you've misunderstood the economics. In the presence of competition, productivity improvements result in lower prices.

Hence why we need UBI tied to inflation and paid for with VAT - perhaps partly or fully, potentially eliminate income tax to not penalize working.

What would happen if instead of collecting tax for UBI the central bank would issue new currency? Prices would keep on raising forever, but from time to time we could cut a few zeros. The ones who hold onto cash would see their money slowly losing value, better use it or lose it. This system would be easier to implement.

That is what what we do now. Controlled inflation by central banks is really controlled reduction of the value of the currency. ~2% per year is the target. The USA gets a free pass at the moment because USD is "the" reserve currency. If/when that changes we might get a lesson in hyper-inflation. :(

That's why the wealthy don't hold much cash. (unless they see a crash coming)

It’s called hyperinflation and never ended well

Farming economics vary a ton from country to country. In the US there is widespread consolidation and larger farms can afford high tech machines. But in poor places where the labor is cheap it's often the case that farm plots are small and fragmented, and the economics of this type of automation don't really work. Not saying it can't, but the delivery model needs to be one where the farmer isn't bearing the cost of the machine.

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