https://www.semafor.com/article/06/13/2023/kenya-tea-pickers-destroy-machines

Kenyan tea workers are destroying the machines being brought in to replace them. What are the general thoughts in pard on the future of automation and how the benefits should be distributed?

Personally I think if we remove the need to manually farm for food via automation then the machines should be taxed or the products should be reduced in price and made accessible (free if needed) to the general public at large.

The current trajectory we're on of a society that has automated the production of essential goods yet deprives society of access to those goods via prices that are insanely out of sync with the cost of production simply to line the pockets of a few people seems like a nightmare to me.

Kenya teapickers get between 20 to 50 bucks a month. These machines promise to reduce costs 3 times so one could argue teapickers will get between 7 to 15 bucks a month. Majority of them are uneducated, saddled with children and uncertain job opportunities elsewhere in the region as there are little other industries to work for to earn a living. Agri producers though depend on this particular region as land is limited to plant tea plantations so workers do have an edge in burning the machinery and keeping costs high.

A good alternative would be to provide teapickers with education/retraining so they can earn equal wages elsewhere (eg as tea-picking machine operators or in textiles, engineering, food production) so that they could add value and this work could support their family. I've visited Indian tea plantations in the north and the south. The north is literally slavery with people sleeping in the plantations themselves in tents together with their kids working for ten bucks a month so we could enjoy our Lipton bagged tea here in Europe. Needless to say their kids never go to kindergarten or school. South (Kerala, Tamil Nadu) has unionized and wages are still laughable according to western standards, however people are able to afford housing and shelter for their kids (but not much else). Sri Lanka is as bad as the Indian North.

Overall poverty is a huge issue in commodities, especially agricultural commodities as some of the stuff we consume here in the western world - is literally made by slaves and/or children (eg Ivory Coast - which produces majority of worlds cocoa - https://foodispower.org/human-labor-slavery/slavery-chocolate/ or DRC which produces 60% or worldwide cobalt we use in luxury EVs (cheap EVs use LFP batteries without cobalt)).

This post was edited by Malopox on Jun 14 2023 11:08am

its just the beginning. my company has had insults hurled at us every single time we do installs during a strike. just wait until the self driven semis come, you'll see highways blocked once a week for years until it fizzles out.

i told ghot this years ago, he called them baseball seamers because boomers dont understand. when i told my grandma we did automated lines for a 3d printing plant that had 3 employees (1st, 2nd, and 3rd shift) using 300 machine she finally got it. most never will tho. they'll just deflect to the inflated number of college grads compared to plumbers and talk about how they worked through college and had a house by 25.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jun 14 2023 11:28am

Capitalism can't function without a strong class of wage earners buying goods and it can't function without technological advancement improving efficiency and eliminating workers.

You might notice the contradiction there. Capitalism is inherently unstable. Depressions and recessions are a feature of the system as it wrestles with its own instability

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Jun 14 2023 11:36am

Modern capitalism complicated by international trade where goods literally have more freedom to travel the world than people. This creates unfair advantage to move production to countries where one can cut costs on labour/environmental/legal costs - eg tea pickers. It also insulates domestic consumer and capital owner against negative feedback they can experience if their exploitation of the poors goes sour. Tea picker dies of heart attack at 40 and gets buried in the fields? Lipton exec would probably not even get an ESG report card about that. You cant grow tea in UK for shit even if you tried - yet people like drinking it in copious amounts and preferably not paying much for it.

the "free market" capitalism solution would be to remove patents/barriers of design so competition is so plentiful on said production making prices very low for the consumers

india tried to do the same thing when it came to textiles and not adopt new technology, they fell behind rapidly economically due to it.


you need to advance, because someone else will and you will fall behind if not

globalism definitely reduces the accountability of leaders within nation

This post was edited by majorblood on Jun 14 2023 12:08pm

You can grow tea in the UK...

why dont they just pull themselves up by the bootstraps?

lol workers, learn to code

Automation will only work with an UBI