It is true that a vast amount of very valuable stuff is now almost or totally free. Great works which five years ago were expensive in print, such as McCauleys works and Parkmans, are now free on my Kindle. To some extent this will put people out of work, especially the scribbling classes. Almost no history I know correctly portrays the Industrial Revolution in England. They think it created a vast number of poverty-stricken people. It didn’t. The cause was the agricultural revolution which began maybe about 1750. See Goldsmith’s “The deserted village, 1763??”. He describes a rural village depopulated by changes in farming methods. This is the source of all those poverty-stricken people. The factories gave some of them work. Others came to America, others starved.

Think how many musicians were put out of work by the phonograph, tape recorder, etc.

You should also read a piece Ben Franklin wrote on population in 1751 – 13 pages. Adam Smith kept two copies on his desk. Malthus one.

There was process used by landowners to dispossess farmers – it was called enclosure. A rich land owner dispossessed his tenants and turned his land over to sheep, which was more profitable. Everybody knew about this then.

In America the conditions were different: my uncle had an old pamphlet about how to farm, a self-help book for farmers (very American). It described all the tasks such as planting, weeding, and reaping. Most required two men and a boy. It was a great help to have a wife who could produce boys. The book Albion’s Seed points out that if a New Englander and his wife both lived to be fifty they averaged ten children. This is why the population doubled every twenty years! But that was all right because they could just go west and buy another farm.

In England at this time the birthrate was lower, but there was no new land.

(Population in South Carolina did not increase this way. More people died from diseases than were born and new people had to come to take their place (until about 1772).)

What is the purpose of machine learning, Watson, and “growth” if machines do it and we don’t? What is the purpose of living and how does this apply to it? We’re already destroying Nature by fracking shale for natural gas, how much worse does it have to get before people realize that “growth” moves us further faster from where we need to evolve? If I were to imagine myself taking a train ride, I imagine looking out the window and enjoying the scenery (cows, factories, small towns, busy centers, a patchwork quilt). When I think of traveling on a bullet train, I imagine myself on a handheld device and the outside landscape is irrelevant because the train is traveling too fast to take it in. If we are developing technology faster than we can take it in, what will life be like for our grandchildren? Will being smart be an advantage? Or will it be all about having the quickest internet (or whatever it might be called then) feed to come up with the info faster than peers? It becomes a competition with a different skill set; one that is more about salesmanship of ideas, knowledge, and “what’s considered true right now” than solidity in what is traditionally considered true, i.e. I know this because I study this field, rather than, I know this because I looked it up on the internet, and so it must be true.