I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.
Was Bert the Turtle a fellow traveler?
In ancient times people were so valuable that wars were postponed to harvesting, now we are not needed either in agriculture or in the battlefield. They only need us to vote and for sports, but if it's just about running after a ball... a dog does it better.
Anyway, it's weird that you would say this but not recognize some of the same sentiments in
Alien. The crew aren't "the right stuff" astronauts because in
Alien human space travel is normal. It's the province of working-class folks who get screwed over by a multinational megacorporation. They're not stupid versions of Mercury astronauts, they're disposable truck drivers. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the film presents this as a bad thing.
A culture that has FTL technology and perfect robots does not need truck drivers with union claims, they are only meat for the monster.
Marx said the same thing about cotton gins and waterwheels I think. I don't believe it turned out quite like he imagined.
There will always be working class people doing menial labor, simply because robots are bad at jobs that people are good at (like moving things and fixing machines), because it's a normal and natural complement to each other. Machines can't do everything, and even if they could, we really wouldn't want them to. Not because they'll outcompete us, but because, like Mengzi says, young people should live in "hardship" and "struggle" in order to build their moral, physical, and intellectual character. If you are too comfortable you become old, decrepit, and morally bankrupt, so it should be reserved for the elderly to live in comfort waited on hand and foot by the robotic peons.
IMO the only reasons people would think menial labor is bad or something and has to be eliminated is because they're afraid of being uncomfortable/having a crummy job and think people who work in these jobs are somehow going to be happy they won't have jobs, or just assume that labor relations are going to be smoothed over by giving bosses vastly more power than they already have over workers. There's inherently nothing wrong with being a truck driver, or a farmer, and the future will have farmers and truck drivers, because they're arguably far more important than roboticists and astronauts, though. You can't eat without truck drivers or farmers, but you can eat without robots or spaceships.
Getting screwed over by your boss because they want you to pickup a alien penis monster with a proclivity towards sloppy smooches is bad, but that's not really the same as being a truck driver, in general. That's just being a truck driver for a shitty company that doesn't care about its workers. Like a lot of companies do in the USA right now, and did back then, because Aliens is a movie as much about today as it was the 1970's. The Aliens guys just needed unions to keep from being seen as disposable parts for a machine that takes in people, grinds them up, and spits them out. We got there a good bit faster than Ridley Scott imagined I suppose.
Which is rather the point as it's the end-state of a lot of techno-fetishism: it's not concerned with improving work relations of truck drivers and farmers to their bosses. That's hard work because it requires not assuming a superiority complex alongside the invented, modernist hierarchy of "comfort is better than hardship" where the guy who has the less physically demanding job is in charge. It's concerned with putting truckers and farmers out on the street so they can't complain about increasingly bad working conditions. Marx's solution was to have workers seize the means of production through force of arms and form democratic councils of armed militias of workers. That didn't work, of course, not because it wasn't tried or because it was bludgeoned to death, but because workers had sufficient power to muscle through changes like 8-hour work days and minimum wages that appeased them in the late 19th century.
Now we're at a similar crossroads since the 1970's and the rise of financialization, and robots are promising to eliminate the worker issues like they were in the 1880s I suppose. More than likely there will be a re-evaluation of worker relations in the coming decades though.
We're getting to the point where entire groups of workers, who are probably not useful for tasks besides menial jobs, might be replaced by robots in the future, assuming (big if, really) that futuristic robots aren't all hot air. What happens to those people? Do they starve in the street? Are they going to be arrested for being homeless because they lost their job to a Tesla Truck? Are they going to be allowed to freeze to death in alleyways of exposure because shanty towns need to be swept out of sight? Are they going to be transitioned to a new job of similar task requirements, assuming any still exist?
FWIW it's also not clear if robots will actually be good enough to do all that since real life robots can barely open a door without toppling over.
Most factory jobs these days are moving parts between various mechanical work stations because machines are bad at this sort of rapid twisting, twirling movements that people are good at, or maintaining said mechanical work stations. So I don't think that it's a likely outcome that menial laborers will be destroyed by big bad robots (a local factory I worked at once recently got large welding robots and still uses people to load the robots with huge shells, for instance). I think the bigger issue is that poor labor relations and bad compensation for the workers will end up destroying the labor market instead, because people would rather pay relatively cushier office workers large amounts of money instead of menial laborers, for whatever reason.
Suffice to say, menial workers/space truckers/space farmers in space fiction is fine. It's a good way to expose the fact that menial workers in real life are treated like literal spare parts or human cogs, instead of, you know, people. It can also be good at entertaining people who are simply there for a spooky monster house mystery movie.
Also in ancient times people were worth much less than they are now, which is kind of a given. Not sure where you get the loonie idea that because a bunch of soldiers have to bring in the harvest they're "worth more". It isn't true in North Korea why would it be true in Ancient Rome? The only difference between then and now is that people were also less productive.
You had two issues: your boss still doesn't give a shit how much work you do, but you also can't do much work to begin with. You dying or being injured on the job is a lot less impactful to him and it's probably factored in that a smidge of the workforce will be crushed by 20 ton stone blocks or something and a lot more will get broken bones and go back to work in a few weeks. This was before workman's comp, remote site data backups, and state pensions though, so who knows what sort of calculations were used beyond implicit rules of thumb really, the Ancient Egyptians weren't great at keeping long surviving records of their basic accounting practices. We just know that a lot more people were injured in work sites back then than they are now.
Better than an SA80?
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(I lost my fav dog yesterday & had to make something to keep sane - I dedicate this build in memory of Kadenz) From Forbidden Planet: Colt/Vickers Atomic-Fusion Rifle I built this from the kit by nick'sdad, I disliked the cast from original mold 'hand-grip assembly', it was too small for...
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It's a good movie ye.
of course.
