Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
Wrong. Slavery was a boat anchor on the economy. It didn't help.
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I had that idea for the first time just moments ago; to question the narrative of the relative prosperity of the US being derivative of slavery. We're all livin' in abundance because of inefficient cotton pickin' hundreds of years ago?
We all know slavery ended (for the advanced civilizations anyhow) because technology obsoleted it. That realization does make one wonder how much clinging onto obsolete methods propelled a society into abundance.
The whole premise of automation is to obsolete the usefulness of human effort. Things are interesting now, in that for the first time, it's unclear if physical effort or mental, is the most obsolete form of human effort. We're all painting ourselves into a corner, and it's unclear to us where that corner is.