Consider that you're thinking too much of "cow farming" when you think of human farming.
No, humans are too useful to just eat! Even for menial tasks. You could think of slavery as a primitive form of human farming, but it's inefficient: being too harshly treated means poor health and mental performance, which means the tasks they can work in are limited. No, the farmers that would be worthy of farming humans would be more astute.
It's far more efficient to let a farmed kind live just comfortably enough to be healthy and develop themselves (free range), as long as they (1) are imposed with an element of scarcity that will force them to struggle to be useful in exchange for the scarce element and (2) the farmer is positioned in such a way that they extract value from these useful activities, with no downside.
As a bonus, because there's an element of competition for the scarcity, the farmed kind will police themselves (fairly or not), and band together, cooperating to generate an oversized portion of the scarce element at a certain level of increased risk for the leaders of the band - we can call them stakeholders. Winning stakeholders will be rewarded with increased amounts of the scarce element, and losers will be punished with a loss of scarce elements.
Extraordinarily successful stakeholders would be rewarded with benefits, and benefit not unlike the farmers - they are to be rewarded for their feats.
Those that are successful enough will be invited to travel to the farmers' homeland riding on a giant space phallus...
throwawayayay55|4 years ago
No, humans are too useful to just eat! Even for menial tasks. You could think of slavery as a primitive form of human farming, but it's inefficient: being too harshly treated means poor health and mental performance, which means the tasks they can work in are limited. No, the farmers that would be worthy of farming humans would be more astute.
It's far more efficient to let a farmed kind live just comfortably enough to be healthy and develop themselves (free range), as long as they (1) are imposed with an element of scarcity that will force them to struggle to be useful in exchange for the scarce element and (2) the farmer is positioned in such a way that they extract value from these useful activities, with no downside.
As a bonus, because there's an element of competition for the scarcity, the farmed kind will police themselves (fairly or not), and band together, cooperating to generate an oversized portion of the scarce element at a certain level of increased risk for the leaders of the band - we can call them stakeholders. Winning stakeholders will be rewarded with increased amounts of the scarce element, and losers will be punished with a loss of scarce elements.
Extraordinarily successful stakeholders would be rewarded with benefits, and benefit not unlike the farmers - they are to be rewarded for their feats.
Those that are successful enough will be invited to travel to the farmers' homeland riding on a giant space phallus...
acomar|4 years ago