Farm automation could cost us jobs as food surplus continues to grow
The ability to produce adequate food to sustain the human race has historically been problematic, but to be able to securely and consistently produce and transport to anywhere in the world sufficient to feed 7 billion people is the crowning glory of advanced technology in the 21st century.
It is an achievement personified by the Irish Ploughing Championship and leaves everyone who attends in awe of what human intelligence and ability can achieve in the creation of technology that so spectacularly serves the people.
It raises two great problems for humanity in the 21st century: how to prevent gross overproduction which is utterly destroying business and how to give mass populations any stake in economics since we need less and less of their labour.
Although we witness the obscenity of people still starving, the world is producing about twice as much food as 7 billion people can consume. About 30% of the normal shopping trolley ends up in landfill; the balance is either ploughed back into the soil.
A popular feature of the Ploughing Championship is extraordinarily powerful and sophisticated machinery which enables massively increased agricultural output combined with incredible reduction of reliance on human labour. This is what advancing technology is about; producing more with less work. The food security such developments ensure are greatly welcomed, but the implications for overproduction and massive elimination of work are enormous.
Social, political and economic commentators rarely speak of such implications and have a wonderfully successful way of dealing with the issue. They simply never mention or discuss the topic. They persevere the pretense that technology has no real impact on economic activity and that the ideology of promoting growth, producing more and working harder is alive and well.
Technology has shredded economic ideology of past generations and urgently demands we face up to the complications of overproduction, gross wastage, stagnated growth and greatly accelerating unemployment.
Unless and until we develop a new economic ideology to match our extraordinary technological success involving systematic restraint on overproduction and generation of much more employment from less work our whole economy is heading like for the landfill and oblivion.
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