Reply #91: Honestly, I don't see much disagreement here.

[joshcryer]

I don't have to cite "civilizations in the past that didn't pollute and shared resources freely," to show that it's possible and an outcome that we can and should strive for. All I have to do is show energy usage of other species on the planet and compare that to our own. I have done that. Now you can dismiss this simple argument, as you have done, but doing so shows an ignorance of simple high school physics.

Agriculture allowed for specialization, but it also allowed for domination. The non-local empires could not have existed without agriculture. But I don't see that as an inevitable historical end, only the one we unfortunately had to experience.

In a technological society specialization would become more abstract than it currently is, because machines would do the producing, and humans would do the designing. Once a design is made and with the proper software toolsets, it can be copied and shared freely, so that reliance on a given specialized task is unnecessary unless you want to be completely cutting edge, and even then, once you meet consumption requirements "cutting edge" itself becomes abstract, because what is the difference between a music device that can hold all the music ever created and one that can hold twice that? The basic process would be a consumer-producer relationship, that is, everyone that consumes would also produce.

You say that "more people would have to become farmers," but I posit that in a technological society that isn't hung up on archaic ways of production (such that we have been doing for nearly 10k years; geoagriculture), of course "more people would be farmers," but also "most anything else." Food would necessarily be grown in vertical gardens, that is, big skyscrapers designed to recycle a cities waste and turn it into food. Given that they would rely on hydroponics or aeroponics they would not need to utilize soil, and the feed stocks would come directly from the sewage lines.

Industrialization certainly got a push by fossil fuels, but even the earliest inventors thought that biofuels were going to be the way motive power was utilized.

The press was one way knowledge was disseminated, but it also means the rejection of common doctrine and a move toward scientific understanding.

I have no problem with making machines our slaves.