Gotter Dunn
As a species, we’re getting more and more done with less and less effort. The story is as old as the Industrial Revolution, and it’s been told so many times I could probably just copy and paste it from the internet. But why put in that much effort? Artificial intelligence in the form of large-language models could do the job for me, made to order and in book length if I requested it. With computer-generated illustrations, too, undoubtedly.
The stand-up comic Larry the Cable Guy used to have the tag line “Git ‘er done!” to great acclaim. These days, it’s as if we’ve got ‘er done.
It used to take a whole family and some extra outside help to produce enough food for that family by farming. Now a single bachelor farmer (to use Garrison Keillor’s fun term) with a hulking shed full of equipment can produce enough food with his solitary labor to feed a modest-sized county for months on end. The large, high-tech equipment he’s working to make payments on were built by fewer people than were involved in making Henry Ford’s Model A-s. The stamped steel, the wiring harnesses, the hydraulic and computer control systems were assembled by few human hands. Even the steel, copper, siliconized rubber, and other material inputs came from largely automated production plants.
Viewed from a distance, machinery has already replaced human labor and left solitary individuals working all by themselves, complete strangers to one another while at the same time members of a geographically far-flung team, of sorts. Which is not meant to prompt misty-eyed nostalgia: mindless assembly-line work was unbelievably monotonous, sometimes back-breaking, and not infrequently dangerous. The fact that automation can take it over is a good thing. Altogether it has left us with a lot of time on our hands—time to pursue other goals, to do other things.
The replacement of human hard labor by machines has been a gift and blessing. Much of the remaining work is less than critical for survival, but instead involves services in which people interact. This will be even more the case when automation moves through white-collar professions. Person-to-person services will be where labor moves. Or so it seems likely to me.
Maybe the promise of technology and automation today is to leave us to do the work of human-to-human interaction rather than futzing with machinery and other inanimate objects.
To get an idea of farming tech:
To get an idea of how a machine in forestry replaces the armies of loggers of the past:
Apropos of nothing, another weird word thing. On an article at UnHerd, I posted a comment in which I mentioned the Battle of Stalingrad, in which the two sides were Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The comment is "held pending approval," uniquely for my occasional comments there. I assume it's because I used the word "Nazi."
Today’s special animal friend is the Atlantic sea nettle, Chrysaora quinquecirrha, a very beautiful jellyfish that is only mildly toxic compared to lots of others. In humans, its sting usually causes an itching, burning rash that lasts less than one hour; if you have an allergy, though, it could be much worse. Be careful in the ocean. Anyway, as I said, they are very beautiful, with “oral arms” that remind me of frilly curtain edging; this feature is called “lappets.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WiCRNjkVBM
Atlantic sea nettles come in white, pinkish, and yellow. The articles don’t say “orange,” so maybe the pictures of orange ones are due to lighting in the aquariums:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysaora_quinquecirrha#/media/File:Chrysaora_quinquecirrha.jpg
The medusa or bell of the Atlantic sea nettle can be up to 16 inches in diameter. From the circumference depend up to 40 filament-like tentacles. The number of tentacles correlates with the color of the sea nettle. The tentacles are covered with cnidocytes. Some of these cells, which are unique to jellyfish in the Cnidaria phylum, are adhesive, causing the tentacles to stick to a prey animal or a potential predator. Others include miniscule toxin-containing spikes that “explode” on contact, causing paralysis or death to small animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euZRyylRqU
As is typical of jellyfish, sea nettles bodies are about 95% water. Biologists have described these animals as “a mobile nervous system,” because they lack many of the organs – such as a brain – that we expect to find. Sea nettles are also a digestive system, and they reproduce both sexually, in their free-swimming medusa stage, and asexually in their bottom-dwelling polyp stage. It’s very complicated but successful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOf2RRmSkgQ
The Atlantic sea nettle is found in warm water near the coast, especially in the kinds of places a person might like to swim or dive, such as the Florida Keys. Their lifespan is about a year, although there’s some variance in how long they remain in the polyp stage: it depends on water salinity. They are not rated by IUCN. Predators include sea turtles, other jellyfish, and the enormous, weird ocean sunfish.