"labour" is a correct word, even if your spell checker says otherwise

[I just wanted to give the Brits their due mjo]

"Others suggested, for political and moral reasons, such a comparison can and should never be made, obviating the fact that humans are replaced with machines on a regular basis."
That's just silly. From almost every reasonable standpoint, people ARE machines. We build them into productive members of society, use them to "make something", and retire them when they're no longer useful. People are also machines from the standpoint that they require fuel(food) to do the work, which is what this is about. Saying it's "immoral" to make the comparison is akin to saying knowledge is immoral so we should all be ignorant to the world we live in.

[couldn't agree more mjo]

Very humbling. I always assumed my life was worth at least 4.5 barrels of oil. Five when I've had too much coffee.

From a purely energy standpoint, you're exactly right. But I think that it is still an unfair comparision.

Humans are ill-suited to perform the type of work that oil-burning machines perform. But what makes the human race unique? Mainly, our intellect. It took thousands and thousands of years for humans to 1. Discover that oil can be burned, 2. Figure out how to drill for it, 3. Learn how to refine it into a usable form, 4. Invent the machines that use oil as fuel.

When comparing the amount of energy encapsulated in oil, it is only fair to compare it to the energy consumed and produced by the generations of people that preceded this point in the human race.

This is an unfair comparison. Food production relies on energy. That energy will always be cheaper than the cost of food.

When will 'They' start culling the herd to keep the luxury lifestyles of the rich and powerful going for just a little while longer?

They'll put Adolf Eichmann to shame; you know they will.

[I too fear this may be the most likely scenario mjo]

mrbell,
that is a dangerous road you walk. from a moral perspective if you say that machines are equivalent to humans because they perform similar work the door gets opened for questions like "is it more important to save me or my computer in a fire?" My computer can figure out more complex things than I can...

machines are made to perform a task for people, machines are property. society has generally accepted that this is ok and that treating people as property to complete a task is wrong.

i know that 'what society says' is a poor definition of morality, but regardless of what moral system you subscribe to, saying that human life is equivalent to a machine is a very weighty claim to make.

Dear Anonymous,

From your statement quoted below, I can tell that you don't see the reality of our world yet:

>that is a dangerous road you walk. from a moral perspective if you say that machines are equivalent to humans because they perform similar work the door gets opened for questions like "is it more important to save me or my computer in a fire?"

What happened when GM tried to save 50 cents worth of metal on the gas tanks of certain models of trucks, knowing in advance that fires caused by collisions would increase the number of deaths? Their accountants made a rational (?) decision based on their "computation" of the worth of a human life. GM figured that the additional expense from the occasional lawsuit divided by the total number of vehicles produced justified the savings of 50 cents per fuel tank. I guess there are two intersecting lines on a graph, and they pick a spot to the left of the break-even point - it all comes down to money.

Another case has to do with air travel. It was well known that evaporation of fuel in the tanks of airplanes would mix with air occasionally in an explosive ratio, and a spark, whether from static electricity or faulty wiring could blow the entire airplane up mid-flight (just occurred to me that the previous sentence is probably running through the NSA's computers and "they"are looking up my IP address now.) The solution to the problem is to install nitrogen tanks which fill the fuel tanks with inert gas as they empty, leaving no room for oxygen to enter and mix with the fuel vapors.

However, such a system would have added cost to each airplane, and weight, which would have reduced the number of passengers and cargo each airplane could carry, and thus, the revenue.

The FAA had to come up with a "reasonable cost" for such a system. The question is, where do you draw the line? The system could cost $ 100,000 up to multiple millions, with each added dollar increasing safety limited by the law of diminishing returns. In order to reign in costs, a value had to be assigned to a human life. According to the FAA, that value is about $ 800,000 and did not justify requiring airlines to install the safety system. (The same question is being raised on the question of whether to install anti-missile measures on passenger airlines to guard against the threat of terrorist having access to Stinger missiles.)

So, the TWA 800 (is that the correct flight number?) flight disaster could have been avoided, but the FAA did not consider it cost-effective.

We already live in a world which puts an economic value to each priceless human life, so this whole argument it moot.

While we are at it, let's also drop the GDP system as a measurement of a country's output, since it does not value human endeavors such as art, recreation, education, quality of life, etc. Our news media, government, even we ourselves are too concerned about economic growth and productivity. The best thing for this world would be a zero-growth economic policy where we concentrate on quality.

Dennis

The biggest bummer about all of this is how inefficient cars are in the sense that they are designed just to move us around. The fact is humans are pretty efficient and use little energy of reasons like the fact that we don't weigh very much. Cars use a whole lot of energy just moving themselves, so they waste all kinds of this precious energy packed resource we call oil. If only we could drink the stuff and use it ourselves.

While it has some factiness it isn't the whole story. If we had to replace oil, we would not do it by reproducing all the same energy output with human muscles.

For instance, it's a 3 mile drive to the store. Driving a 15 MPG SUV I might burn 1/3 gallon, roughly equivalent to 31000/3 = 10000 calories.

If we were going to push an SUV to the market it probably would take days and days. We might even need a block and tackle.

But what if we just walk? They say the simple rule of thumb is 100 calories per mile. If we walk 3 miles we might consume 300 calories.

So what is a human life "worth?" I can walk a long ways in a life, and if I compare to an SUV driving the same distance, I can be worth a lot of oil.

(Yes certainly an SUV can carry a ton of medical supplies 300 miles, which might take a few humans much longer ... but that is NOT the normal use-case for oil in our American society.)