omniscitoad

I'm not at all against industrialization and machines, Bleeg. I would love for us to live in a world where everything is made easier by machines, and all of our food was bio engineered to taste batter and be better for us. Hell, if you handed me a chicken that was bio-engineered to taste like chocolate, but didn't give me cholesterol, I'd take out my spork and my electric carving knife and dig in. I just think that we need to be aware and accepting that progress often comes at a human cost (u

Second - re-skilling ... I have a beef with this term. People tend to bandy it about a bit to much "lost your job? Just re-skill and find another one!". Gaining a new skill set for a job often involves an exorbitant amount of time, effort, and money. Even more so in a heavily technologically based society. There may be a new job created in order help service a newly mechanized industry, but that doesn't mean that the factory worker that was displaced by that mechanization can enter that job

Oh Ned Ludd, where hath thy spirit gone? I am entirely one for industrialization and progress (I like my robots as much as the next chap), but I really have to play devil's advocate here, cus' you all seem to be way on the 'progress' side of the fence. For the record, I have a computer science degree and I work in IT services, so I am right in the thick of one of those 'new jobs' created by the need to upkeep machines. First, lets look at a simple example. Say you have a job