I, Pencil: The Movie

What people said

pieno · 2020-09 · Recommendation

Reminds me of this movie illustration the complexity and human collaboration required to produce a pencil: [VIDEO] (6:33 in total; it’s a bit “dreamy” sometimes but still worth a watch, you can skip the first minute). Basically entire human civilization is based on collaboration, learning from and relying on each other (among other things). The process kickstarted with developments in agriculture, freeing up Human Resources to work on other things. We’ve been perfecting this for a few thousand years, of which we’ve been automating things using software for only 50 years (being generous here). Give it some time - with the current rate of development we may not need another thousand years to improve software development to near perfection as well ;-) (Or more pessimistically: there’s still a lot of hunger in this world so even after a few thousand years we’ve not even perfected the most basic of human needs - doesn’t bode well for something as fancy as the typical glorified beans counter that is most enterprise software...) Disclaimer: This video is typically used as a pro free markets argument to illustrate the level of cooperation required to produce even the simplest things, arguing that such collaboration is only possible by free actors in a free market - that’s not the point here but still interesting tangent to think about in this context.

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CWuestefeld · 2020-02 · Recommendation

Or, how to make a pencil. [VIDEO] (not the same guy at all, but your comment reminded me of this. It's really about specialization and the interdependency of everything in the economy)

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flyingfences · 2017-03 · Recommendation

For those looking for an even shorter read, Leonard Read's I, Pencil gets the basic point across pretty quickly. There's even a video adaptation available for those who don't want to read at all. [LINK] [VIDEO]

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