🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (8 tweets)
In farming, competition meant human labor (literal work, as in energy) was replaced with horses, and then horses with machines powered by fuel.In a service economy, human effort itself becomes a commodity, traded and sold in platform based markets.https://t.co/cx5xfBdql4
In farming, forces behind the trend was Cost gravity. Amplification of output due to cheap fertilizer. Mining bird shit, then synthetics / mining mountains. In service economy, driving force is also price gravity. Technology lowers barriers = low friction = cheap effort.
In farming, much of the labor demand was driven by stuff like wars removing massive numbers of laborers off the market, and large scale disease.In the service economy, the trend seems to be driven by lower birth rates and changing patterns among various generational cohorts.
If you go back in time, you'll see rich people with dozens of servants running their household. Now we have computers (machines), apps and "AI" assistants hiding that most of the effort of these tools is outsourced to mechanical turk style, or done directly by users themselves.
What used to take weeks, even months of time - people on horses or boats ferrying mail across large distances, is now replaced by electricity + software. The human effort being hidden behind user interfaces.People rarely think about massive human machines behind mail service.
We live in a world where the postal service is in decline, and yet more and more people are employed by food delivery services. I read stories about people getting deliveries from restaurants that are only 3 flights down in the same building.
I wonder if ant colonies have ants that specialize in sharing food. A sort of middle ground between the honey-pot ants and their normal trophallaxis. I know in super colonies they create trade networks, with some dedicated to sharing between colonies.https://t.co/Mcp3nsPu2T