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Why would the wealthy want you back in the fields?

You were useful in the fields to the degree that was necessary for food production (sustain and grow population) and for wars (using said population to expand and extract more resources).

Once machines automate material comforts and exertion of violence (already have, to a large degree), humans become a pure loss center. Why bother with "fields" lol.

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Because fundamentally: certain humans desire power to rule over other humans. Even if the fields (metaphorical or literal) can be done more efficiently by robots, they desire that power to exert over others.

So they will keep some ready for those tasks simply to fuel that irrational desire. They will instead use the more efficient bots to enforce work on the fields rather than work the fields themselves. Or perhaps we go full Matrix and find uses for humans that robots can't properly replicate.

Sure, keeping a few humans around for some kind of futuristic degenerate mammalian social/power games I can get behind.

That's not "back in the fields" though (metaphorical or literal).

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