To expand too, mass-production has been an inestimable boon on modern society by organizing human labor in such a way more can be made with less. The advent of the industrial revolution evolved the before-stated re-orientation of European class structure from a economic society less dependent on agricultural produce and workshop labor to the large manufactury where the world's tools, instruments, and commodities can be produced cheaply and quickly. While early on it had more of an impact on the professional tradesmen by relegating the work they did professionally into a series of route tasks that could be done unprofessionally with as much quality - or at least more quantity than before with the added bonus of parts being more readily replaceable before following standardization - the ground work for industrialism's following triumphs would begin to play its greater role across all of society.

As soon as mechanization was perfected the large part of human society could then be taken from the poor rural community and added to the... poor urban one as more unskilled labor. Or at the least old farming families could produce more food with less work, creating an economy of time never before seen which could be saved on putting themselves through college or the next generation in college contributing to an expansion of the intelligentsia, a second boom so-to-say after post Black-Plague Europe and the changing social dynamic during the 16th and 18th centuries; this time in the 19th and early 20th century. The growth of the college and university going class, and thus contribution to the degree-holding class as a means to advance society continued on with societal shifts like the sharp raise of industrial wage growth prompted by Union activity or even Henry Ford's five-dollar an hour salary creating the blue-collar middle-class. And even today with automation taking over more of the factory space there's a fifty or sixty-year of human development where in the west it is more economical to get a professional college degree to get into the high-skilled workforce which is really driving technical progress ahead.

By laying out this present model the point is clear: that a population with more people free and open creates the opportunity that those idle will advance a field of human society.

Anthropologically this is asserted as what made humanity go from simple village life to complex city-state life and eventually more and more complex political models resulting in the end the nation state, as created from a group of the population who can be idle for much of the year or all of the year because they are supported in whole or in part by the surplus of society's own production.

A collapse of automation and the mechanical farm would mean that far more brain-trustees would be forced to work in the fields or the workshops using their labor time less to advance the current state and more to simply maintain the status quo. Or, you know: making sure their family and community doesn't starve. This is assuming that these people don't already starve in their intellectual idleness.

This comes down as the root ultimately of my argument. That the collapse of modern technical manufacture and harvest destroys the opportunities of labor savings in fully mechanical farms, and fully or largely automated factories, that forces more and more of what'd be today's "professional" workforce to take up the plow and hammer. They're not there anymore to re-invent the tank, or the battleship, or the power plant, or nuclear fission. Materially, as determined by their immediate circumstances, they got to keep themselves alive.