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Comment by xhevahir | Hacker News Reader

> how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk

Given how little Americans walk and how much blame their sedentary lifestyle has gotten for obesity and diabetes and so on, i don't think this is a good example.

EDIT: If anything it's something of a counter-example: of an activity that technology has made to a great degree superfluous, and which has to be added to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness.

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It is actually a very good example, IMO. It shows that it is possible to offload important parts of humanity onto machines - and that it is, in such a case, also necessary to pay the costs of that offloading.

Bearing the burden of a civilization-wide illness such as obesity and diabetes is such a cost. But, hey, at least a large amount of the country is designed in a way that mandates commute via cars and makes "adding to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness" even more inconvenient.

The predominance of cars (and the alternative of mass transit) doesn't do anything to change the fact that some technology or technologies have scratched walking from many people's list of central activities, and that some people who have seen the ill effects of this change have found another, more or less corrective, place for it. I take that to be the author's meaning, and I agree with them that this would be a sad diminution of a fundamental human practice.

I'd argue further: that the fundamental human practice is a constant attempt to automate away the "less" fundamental human practices, such as survival, herd instinct, walking and running, now thinking, in the future perhaps sensory perception, muscle motions, and eating and digesting.

Only once we automate our whole existence away we will start grasping for true satisfaction; once automating away what's left is also automated away, we will truly, and finally, be successful as a species.

I can't tell whether making some kind of transhumanist argument in earnest or if you're only joking, or something else altogether.

Exactly my point. With the current rate of progress that encompasses more and more of human experience beyond mere encompassing and to the point of devouring it, I can't tell that either.

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