sábado, 9 de julho de 2022

The limits of development and progress

Roberto da Silva Rocha, university professor and political scientist
The limits of development and progress
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It is not neo-Luddism, that movement in England against machines in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution, against the machines that destroyed the jobs of workers who produced through manual and artisanal manufacturing against the disproportionately much more efficient competition from industrial machines and the series production line.

The Industrial Revolution brought two problems: the crisis of overproduction very well explored by the macroeconomic theorist by Heinrich Karl Marx, and the paradigm shift in international trade from mercantilism and slavery to mass production by large transnational companies whose businesses can only exist on a gigantic level, such as tires, steel, automobiles, flat glass, oil refineries, medicine, ships, and so on.

It was never thought beyond Kondratiev and Karl Marx to stop development through laws to control the pace of industrial and technological growth, the evil of our time is that products become obsolete before they lose their ability to be used, such as Windows operating systems that every five years we are forced to change systems simply because the new generation of built-in apps to be used, there are more than 1000 apps that continue and will continue to be unknown and unnecessary for most users, such as the 700 buttons and controls available in a Volkswagen Jetta car model that a driver will never know of the existence of these facilities not going beyond the controls for air conditioning, heater, headlights and flashlights, electric windows and locks, seat control, parking brakes, automatic transmission , cruise control, sound and internet command, engine performance remapping, so many thousands of hours of construction and design of facilities that will never be used, and this same process is repeated in all areas of technology.

It is necessary to set limits for the implementation of new technologies, this unbridled and accelerated progress does not improve people's lives or the efficiency and effectiveness of people's lives, nor does it reduce the costs of people's lives.

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político

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