Humans still do some things better. Thus perhaps buying human labour a reprieve for a few years from the automation Singularity.

Via Olivier Malinur​

The productivity of the remaining workers went up by 2500%!

A very long but very worthwhile essay from 1997 by Loren Goldner which goes into the pivotal role the Enlightenment played both in its positive and negative aspects in the shaping of modern thinking. While the Enlightenment placed the universality of humanity at centre stage it also brought into being new ways of subdividing humanity into a hierarchy of races.

This essay goes into the historical background from which the Enlightenment emerged, the falling away of old Medieval notions of common humanity (Adam’s children), the needs of the newly unified Spanish kingdom and with its anti-semitic and anti-Muslim imperatives, the rise of the post-Reformation revolutions and ultimately to Anglo-French imperial rivalries. Through these changes came new ways​ of thinking for a new social order. It gave birth to colonial era racism, a justification of slavery and to biological theories that pointed directly ahead to Nazism in the 20th century. But it also unleashed other forces— the “best” parts of the Enlightenment which are still celebrated today—ideas that were synthesised by the post-Enlightenment thinkers into demands and programmes dedicated to emancipation, universalism and liberation.

The Enlightenment con­trib­uted to the West­ern the­ory of race, and the real sep­ar­a­tion of cul­ture from bio­logy was the work of post-En­light­en­ment fig­ures such as Marx, and above all the real his­tor­ic­al move­ment of the past cen­tury. Nev­er­the­less, when the En­light­en­ment is at­tacked today — by Chris­ti­an, Jew­ish, Muslim, and Hindu fun­da­ment­al­ists for sep­ar­at­ing re­li­gion and state, or by the new bio­lo­gism of the New Right or the Afro­centrists for its uni­ver­sal­ism, or by the post­mod­ern­ists as an ideo­logy of and for “white European males” — it is the best of the En­light­en­ment, the liberté, égalité, fraternité of the Parisi­an and Haitian masses in 1794, and the best post-En­light­en­ment heirs such as Marx, which are the real tar­gets. Such at­tacks re­mind us that, once cri­tique is sep­ar­ated from the lim­it­a­tions of the En­light­en­ment out­lined here, there is plenty of mys­ti­fic­a­tion still to be de­bunked.