Conversation

We conflate automation (which to me is mainly about routine decision-making) and artificial (non-muscle) powering. You can have passive or muscle powered automation. Eg a tortilla press automates hand rolling or flattening without artificially powering it.
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High-tech ambient or human-power should be more of a thing. Eg. Hand-cranked flashlights and radios. Bonus points for disintermediating electricity entirely. Like long now clock is ambient temperature variation driven iirc.
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Electrify everything… except where you can muscle-power or ambient-power it. 19th/early 20th century was great at this. Eg treadle-powered sewing machine. My mom had one and I’d pump it just to play. Good to electrify for sweatshop workers but for casual, occasional home use?
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Wonder how much human energy fuels obesity and useless and tedious exercise rather than work. If you eat an average of 100 calories too much/day. Works out to 5W/human. About 0.116 kWh/day. Not much given 50+ kWh/human/day but it might have leveraged effects 🤔
Replying to
It takes ~7.3x as much energy to produce (+transport, store etc.) the food, compared to what you could get back from the human. Accounting for that, a hand-cranked machine would seem to have a larger carbon footprint than an electrically powered one...
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