Energy Slave - Implications

Implications

The implication of the energy slave unit is that each of the workers who did not walk were able to return to picking apples, and therefore increase their personal productivity. Doing the labor of 10 persons with 2.5 persons worth of work (10-7.5), the labourers with Energy Slaves can produce 10/2.5, or 4 times, as much work, in the same amount of time. Their personal wealth, and/or that of their employer, can be expected to increase; however, because of the huge energy investment behind the infrastructure, the margin of benefit for the employer and the workers must be less than 4 times the value of the work of the unassisted workers.

If energy slaves were actually free, then we would seek to shunt off as much labour as possible onto them. However, they are not free, and the cost of an energy slave, compared to the cost of human labour, may decide when to use an energy slave and when to use a person. A more interesting question than that about the calories used by the different systems is the question of the cost of each. The cost of human labour trends downward as the number of workers grows faster than the work available to support them, and as the number of energy slaves decreases per person. Meanwhile, as the cost of energy increases, the investment required to use energy slaves instead of people may become greater than the cost of people.

When someone discusses the amount of energy used to produce, harvest, transport and distribute a head of broccoli to a store three thousand miles away, the energy used can be expressed in terms of the number of energy slaves required to do that work. Since there are so many such deeply nested costs associated with the industrial infrastructure, we need some way to resolve the energy used to build the truck, to smelt the steel and convert petroleum into plastics, into units of human labor. Would we directly substitute an actual person walking across the country with the head of broccoli for the truck that actually carries it for the sake of comparative productivity? Or do we just divide the units of energy used by the industrial infrastructure by the number of calories used by one person to accomplish the same task, to get energy-slaves?

People who use this term want to convey in human terms the amount of energy required to support our modern American lifestyle. Another way to articulate this ratio is in terms of the energy required to grow food and transport it, as compared to the energy that food provides to a person. In a society with only human labor, you could not consume more energy than you produce in food. What does it mean when the energy required to produce food exceeds the food value it provides to a person? Just how much more energy than is contained in the food is acceptable? These are questions like those when using the "energy slave" unit, that need to be answered by people seeking understanding of these units.