Funny you should choose the sickle over the hammer. In industrialized nations commodity crops like wheat, soy, corn, and rice are predominantly mechanically harvested. But tree fruit, berries, and a lot of veggies remain hand-picked or have a mixed manual/mechanical harvesting method that’s much more labor intensive than a combine mowing down endless acres of wheat.
The hammer however has seen a massive decline in full time use across construction sites in developed nations. It’s still a useful tool and most workers carry one, but pneumatic nail guns dominate new construction in developed countries that use wood as their base material.
I’d also push back on your claim that hard manual labor in developed nations is automated. Mechanically assisted to varying levels, like a pneumatic nail gun instead of a hammer, or a haybaler instead of a sickle and building a stack, but it’s still got humans putting hours of physical effort into using those machines to achieve the finished product. There’s people behind home construction or remodels, strawberry picking, road construction, and wildland fire fighting to name a few.
…i used a framing hammer to build a wood fence last weekend; it felt good but also surprisingly old-fashioned by comparison to the nail gun the builder used for the original construction…
As the narrator says “the future farmer might not be holding a shovel, they might be holding a remote control”. Technology changes the means by which the humans do the labor, but there’s still a human behind the machine, not an automaton.
Funny you should choose the sickle over the hammer. In industrialized nations commodity crops like wheat, soy, corn, and rice are predominantly mechanically harvested. But tree fruit, berries, and a lot of veggies remain hand-picked or have a mixed manual/mechanical harvesting method that’s much more labor intensive than a combine mowing down endless acres of wheat.
The hammer however has seen a massive decline in full time use across construction sites in developed nations. It’s still a useful tool and most workers carry one, but pneumatic nail guns dominate new construction in developed countries that use wood as their base material.
I’d also push back on your claim that hard manual labor in developed nations is automated. Mechanically assisted to varying levels, like a pneumatic nail gun instead of a hammer, or a haybaler instead of a sickle and building a stack, but it’s still got humans putting hours of physical effort into using those machines to achieve the finished product. There’s people behind home construction or remodels, strawberry picking, road construction, and wildland fire fighting to name a few.
…i used a framing hammer to build a wood fence last weekend; it felt good but also surprisingly old-fashioned by comparison to the nail gun the builder used for the original construction…
https://youtu.be/tbxlMM8AQsU
As the narrator says “the future farmer might not be holding a shovel, they might be holding a remote control”. Technology changes the means by which the humans do the labor, but there’s still a human behind the machine, not an automaton.
The difference is how and why AI labor is utilized from one nation to another.