====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
In a message dated 5/17/2010 4:45:53 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) writes: I don't know whether the science of robotics has yet, as of 2010, cleared all the obstacles in developing full automation. My guess is that it has, nearly. However, picking tomatoes or building houses, are extremely complex tasks for a robot to do well...But it can, and WILL surely be done. Special pressure sensors will be developed for tomato-picking robots, pre-fabricated walls and windows will be devised for home-building robots, etc. Comment I believe the issue is more broad and detailed. Why presuppose the mass harvesting of tomatoes is desirable? If given the choice most people might prefer to eat specific kinds of vegetation based on seasons and what is indigenousness to their "neck of the woods." Then the biogenetic revolution makes indoor or patio harvesting of vegetation a simple matter. Market relations and commodity exchange prejudice our view. For instance there is no spontaneous human market for Mandarin oranges or French strawberries or tomatoes, although I accept the point you were making. . Further, healing the historic rift - metabolic breach, between town and country comes into play. The town must become more country and the country more town. Plus in America we eat to damn much anyway under the ruthless impact of the commercial food industry 24/7 campaigns. If the average American is 25 - 40 pounds overweight, there are 300 million of us and that is a lot of pounds. On the other hand homes - shelter, is a necessity. Education is a necessity. Reorganizing neighborhoods and wiping out crime is a necessity. Most crime is a product of property. On another note, the ousting of labor from production and most certainly from the production of commodities or to be precise the reproduction of the commodity form, is not the meaning of alienation. Alienation is bound up with the living labor process of real people involved in real daily production rather than those shoved outside a job - the production process. Alienation does not arise form the division of labor but rather from the property form of society. Alienation is effected upon a specific development of the means of production but that is because these means of production have evolved as expressing and manifesting a property relations. This is written in response to the below. "The desire/projection for the complete automation of production is primarily a product of the extreme alienation of labor under capitalism" I am not sure what "complete automation" mean in the above sentence? Automation was completed in the mid and late 1950’s. Automation is a concept of the automatic (automaton) self regulating machine, set into motion by an external energy source based on electro-mechanical principles as outlined in Marx Capital 1. The application of advanced robotics to automation is a whole new ball game. A modern computer for instance is a new technology. Open it up and look at it and compare it to Marx precise description of industrial machines in Capital. These self regulating automatic electro-mechanical machines, connected into a system of production that supplements the labor of the worker is the meaning of automation, as Marx use the term. Our vision still suffers from industrial concepts of time, space and process. Emancipation of the species is all about freeing the human - the individual, from the enslaving subordination to the division of labor, not simply capital. I am not suggesting you implied otherwise, just making a point. WL. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
