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One of the first technological advances which was promised to remove burdens, but inflicted greater burdens, was agriculture. I'm sure LJ might have a word to say about that.Among the ills he attributes to advances in technology are that they promise to improve our lives but end up imposing burdens we would not have chosen.
....If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity’s cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth–sun energy–to be found on the planet.....
....however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts–the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
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Manning has an uncanny habit of 'nailing it'...Little John wrote:This man puts it far better than I ever could:
RenewableCandy, in 'The Price of Time' wrote:“I came into being gradually, with a change in Mortals’ behaviour. Can you guess which one?�
“Was it—� she stopped herself just in time.
“Agriculture.�
Agriculture?
“Before that, no Mortal held fear in their mind. At least, not without good reason. There’d been fear all right: fear of cold, hunger, wolves and the like, but those were practical fears: rational fears. Agriculture brought a whole new set-up. Pyramids of folk with distant, all-powerful gods at the top: fearsome gods. Not the old local spirits that anyone could blether to.
“And you asked about lifespan. I’m here for as long as Mortals live with agriculture. If you go back to the older ways, or die out, I shall cease to exist.�
Verity gazed at the little plot: the dug bed with its newly-planted beans.
If she — if humanity — wanted to eat, they were stuck with him.