Yeah, that's one specialized piece of automation in a long line of automation throughout history. I'm not sure why taking humans off of the assembly line is a larger deal than taking humans out of agriculture, textile production, or printing?

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9rx an hour ago | parent [-]

The only thing that is significant is that shift brought us to reaching peak human productivity. Prior to that, humans were not able to be as productive. Consider agriculture: You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. This is why wages were able to grow alongside productivity as we started moving away from a pure agrarian world — having less reliance on external factors limiting what humans could produce. Once humans reached peak human productivity their human-based measures stagnated, but productivity itself did not stop as automation advances have kept that ball rolling. Taking people off the assembly line saw them move into jobs, mostly "knowledge-based" ones, where there was no way to become even more productive. You can only sit around in so many meetings each day, so to speak.

Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.

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contagiousflow 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

> You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing.

I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.

	▲	9rx 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one. Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we achieve that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 18th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. Hence why their measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.