alt Hacker NewsThe pseudo-academic style of the article is awful. All abstractions and buzzwords, no examples. Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range".
Getting past that, the author has a point. There's a loss of shared expertise when there aren't people around learning and doing something. In the US, we've seen this in manufacturing. The number of Americans who know how to set up a good production plant is much lower than it was in the 1980s. That's the consequence of the hollowing out of American manufacturing. The author talks about AI vs. white collar work, but fails to make the connection with outsourcing vs. blue collar work.
The loss of this expertise has recently been made very clear in the US as attempts are made to scale up weapons production for the US's various wars. Progress is very slow, as has been seen with both artillery ammo and air-defense missiles.
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Us manufacturing is larger than ever and still growing. It is mostly automated though so Tht number of people who work in manufacturing is shrinking. Still the expertise is still there and they do hire people all the time.
> Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range".
The term is not "common" or "commons" but "tragedy of the commons" which dates back to a book in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Elinor Ostrom subsequently showed that most or all of Hardin's assumptions and claims were wrong, or at the very least, far from universal, and that the process he describes elides what actually drives the destructions of resources held in common: greed and power.