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>specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering. Industrial Revoluti

>specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering. Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. Average height of Englishman decreased before started to increase (based on military records). Workers started to organize, skulls were cracked. People were shot in the streets. Armies were ordered to kill workers. There were bloody civil wars and revolutions. Industrial revolution was not possible without massive social change that created, land reforms, working class, middle class and increased private consumption and accumulation of capital. It was at times bloody, but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Not so in Soviet Union or China. Anti-Union violence, Union violence (union busting) communist violence, anticommunist violence was pretty intense at time even when the society as whole worked. Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. We can still list numerous conflicts with 10-100 deaths: The Molly Maguire trials (20 workers executed), Battle of Virden, 1898 Colorado labor war,Italian Hall disaster, Ludlow massacre, Thibodaux Massacre, Pullman Strike, West Virginia Coal Wars, Rock Springs massacre, 1905 Chicago Teamsters' strike, Steel Strike of 1919, The Herrin Massacre, 1922, Battle of Blair Mountain, Hanapēpē massacre, Harlan County War, Memorial Day massacre of 1937. Future of Automation will create wealth and prosperity beyond all our dreams, but it requires massive political struggle that settles issues like privacy, rent seeking, ownership of personal information. Violence in the street may be positive sign that automation is finally changing our society.

aswanson 9y ago
Yeah, I struggle with this squaring this disruption with a generally libertarian economic stance. If we truly are at the edge of a disruption that will make the vast portion of workers under or unemployed, what does that mean in terms of social stability and survival for those people?
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  In the 1800s and early 1900s at least some people could emigrate to countries like the US where there was still a lot of open space. Even that's not an option this time.
  - wyldfire 9y ago
    We are not running low on "open space" at all. The habitable area of the planet is vast. Many of the emigrants of the 1800s ended up settling "new" land in the US. But there's vast territories around the world that are extremely inexpensive. Since the 1800s we have grown more dependent on the services provided by the state in urban areas.
    - malandrew 9y ago
      The problem isn't the abundance or lack of open space, it's the fact that the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive.
      - vkou 9y ago
        This. There's a reason that communist revolutions were fueled by a desire for bread, peace, and land. In the start of the 20th century, you could make a decent living if you owned nothing but the land you lived on. Nowadays, you really can't.
        maxxxxx 9y ago
        I wonder what happens if we get robots that can provide a complete living off some plot of land. Like agriculture, energy and whatever you need. So in theory you could live autonomously then. Somehow I think the owning class will come up with ways to make this illegal or impossible.
        PeterisP 9y ago
        Why would robots make a difference? Currently, you can't really live off of a plot of land alone, but you'll be living quite well if you also own a bunch of high tech machinery to farm it efficiently. For a well-off Ferrari-owning farmer, the Ferrari is likely not among the most expensive vehicles he owns, the tractors/combines/whatever cost the big bucks. That's what the poster above meant by "the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive", and owning these robots would be the massive amount of capital; you'd be able to sustain yourself because (and if) you'd have a lot of very expensive robots, not because you just had some land; and you'd also be able to sustain yourself by just investing the value of these robots.
- evanlivingston 9y ago
  Libertarianism doesn't provide a good methodology for prioritizing the well-being of disinenfranchized person's, so If your ethics tell you that preserving property relations are less important than elevating the condition of all humans, then perhaps it is time to evaluate alternative economic stances that prioritize property less than people.
  - etplayer 9y ago
    One such alternative would seem to be Proudhon's anarchism (mutualism) or even Marx's (or his predecessor's) Communism, though I know this is generally an unpopular response, I see no reason why it has no merit.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  I'm not seeing good responses from libertarians regarding the inbalance in how law is practiced; would appreciate pointers to write ups of more effective libertarian-style remedies. That is, corporations with concentrations of power are treated by libertarians as possessing equal standing with individuals in a court of law. In practice, that is absolutely not how it works out. Yet, many a libertarian response to various problem spaces is "the courts will work it out!", in a deus ex machina style conclusion. Spend any appreciable time (>= 10 years) running a business, and you'll probably observe the same: I've yet to meet a business owner who subscribes to the "equal under law" libertarian ideal, everyone I've spoken with agrees that larger concentrations of wealth and power commensurately enjoy greater access and privileges in the court systems around the world that are unobtanium for smaller entities. I've heard the libertarian response of "we're just not capitalist enough" applied to this problem domain; look to US-style private arbitration to see how that's turning out. I've never been a fan of the "no true Scotsman" approach, anyways. Any libertarian-oriented remedies that realistically acknowledge how humans practice acquiring and deploying power of various forms would be appreciated.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    From what I gather, there are really two facets of libertarianism. The social libertarianism, meaning let people do what they want, stop banning everything, drug war is futile, etc. Then there is the economic libertarianism, which means keep the government out of most, if not all business dealings. Deregulate, etc. I highly suspect people are much more interested in the first, but not really the second. Interests who stand to benefit from the second are selling them as a package deal and we will end up only getting the second. In other words, the arrest machine will keep running, but businesses will be free to fleece customers, government and employees with impunity. Surprising though, regulation is intended to save capitalism, not hurt it, at least in the long term. If capitalism runs down a path where it no longer benefits the vast majority of citizens in any given country, there will be hell to pay resulting in the end of capitalism. That would be a shame too, properly regulated capitalism is a really great system.
  - tudorconstantin 9y ago
    Maybe if the laws were closer to what libertarians would like, this equality in front of it would be achievable. The basic libertarian philosophy regarding law says the only enforcing laws should concern the non aggression principle.
- coliveira 9y ago
  Economic libertarianism is the XXI century version of Leibnitz optimism of the XVIII century, which was so eloquently critiqued by Voltaire in Candide -- with Capitalism replacing God. They just believe that capitalism is the best of all possible systems and if we just blindly follow its rules everything will be fine and well, it doesn't matter how many people suffer in the meantime.
  - asdffdsa321 9y ago
    Would it kill you to join everyone else in the 21st century and use numbers instead of romance numerals
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
      FYI, many countries/languages write centuries this way (e.g la langue de Voltaire)
      - freehunter 9y ago
        English-speaking countries? Because as a native English speaker, I have no problem reading their words but I have no idea what kind of numbers they're trying to express.
        cicero 9y ago
        Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals
        freehunter 9y ago
        Yeah I know they're roman numerals but I can't read roman numerals without significant effort. It's bad form to include large roman numerals in English text. The majority of English speakers aren't going to know roman numerals beyond 10.
- narrator 9y ago
  The libertarian would say that if the general public gets access to advanced robotics then there will be enormous prosperity. For example, imagine if you could buy a robot that would survey your backyard, order equipment from amazon, start planting food, set up irrigation, harvest and deliver it to a neighbors automatically? Free locally grown food for everyone. Now, isn't that awesome? You could also rent a robot that would find water, dig wells, trench, put in pipes, etc. The possibilities are endless to take PRODUCTION of goods out of the hands of specialized highly capitalized organizations and into the hands of anybody who can rent a robot. The problem is is that a robot this advanced could also be used for very sophisticated bad purposes, so you're going to have lots of regulation and big corporations will only be able to use these robots and you'll have to buy things they produce with whatever meager wages they let you have.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    How do you pay for the robot if you're not working?
    - narrator 9y ago
      Just take out a loan. The food cost savings and excess production will pay for the loan and they can repo the robot if you don't pay. The robot will even be able to tell you if it's likely to be cash flow positive.
      - gloverkcn 9y ago
        Only people working would qualify for a loan. Those people would have more prosperity until the robots cratered all wages and prices, being free labor and flooding the market with excess. When the prices crash a large number of people with robots will be unable to pay back the loan. Their robots will be repossessed. They will now be out of a job and with no robot. The poor would get left over food from the kindness of people with robots? They'll certainly never work again.
        narrator 9y ago
eighthnate 9y ago
> but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Empires fell during this time in western europe. And we had a civil war in the US. > Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. You forgot the mass extermination of natives in the US due primarily to industrialization. And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined. The nations first to industrialize benefited immensely at the expense of others. But it was extremely bloody in the US as well.
- DamnYuppie 9y ago
  Can you elaborate further on how the extermination of the natives was driven by industrialization. Having lived and traveled all over the west it is predominately, agrarian, large tracts given over for cattle. I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land.
  - digikata 9y ago
    I'm not pushing for any particular interpretation here, but that cattle process could be viewed as early industrialized animal production made possible by the railroad. Graze in open areas, drive a bunch a cattle to centralized markets for transport/slaughter.
  - eighthnate 9y ago
    > I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land. Industrialization is what prompted and allwed ships to bring millions of europeans to the US. It's what allowed railroads to ship millions to the midwest and the west. And of course the desire for oil/resources and farmland/etc. Industrialization is what allowed our armies to wipe out and clear the natives west of the mississippi.
- ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
  The vast majority of the decimation of the Native American population took place before the industrial revolution.
educationcto 9y ago
I think you'd have to count the American Civil War as a conflict caused at least in part by the industrial revolution, which would dramatically increase the toll it took in North America.
- Clubber 9y ago
  The cotton gin was textbook automation. In a strange twist of fate, it actually increased the demand for labor. Because it was very labor intensive to remove the seeds from a cotton boll, cotton wasn't a very profitable industry. After the gin (short for engine, what developers call automation engines), demand for labor and land skyrocketed. The cotton gin is an example of an automation removing the need for labor (deseeding cotton) and subsequently creating a greater need for labor elsewhere (planting and harvesting). Of course, in this example, the increased labor demand ultimately resulted in 720K deaths.
  - duality 9y ago
    Improved efficiency increasing rather than decreasing demand for the newly more efficient resource is called "Jevons paradox".[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - Animats 9y ago
    As I've mentioned before, there's a book from 1926, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", which outlines the three basic cases of what happens when new technology is introduced. Their examples are the Linotype, the glass-bottle blowing machine, and the stone planer. The Linotype was a win for printing workers. Typesetting had been bottlenecking the process, and with fast typesetting, book and newspaper prices came down, and the volume of printed material increased enormously. That's the good case. The glass-bottle blowing machine is the not-so-good case. Bottle-blowing used to take a team of five people trained to work together and manipulate molten glass, blowpipe, and mold with tight coordination. This was a skilled trade and paid well, but bottles were expensive. Automatic bottle-making machines could make bottles rapidly with minimal labor. Bottle sales went up, and the bottle business grew, but the skilled trade was dead. Most of the workers were shoveling sand in one end or taking bottles out the other. This didn't take much skill. Operating the machines was not too hard. You probably needed a maintenance guy who really understood them, but only one for many machines. So most of the skilled jobs went away, replaced by low-paid entry level jobs. The worst case was the stone planer. Back when brick was the key building material, stone lintels were used over doors and windows to provide structural support for the bricks above. Stone was chipped by hand by big guys with big hammers and big chisels to make flat, rectangular stone beams. The stone planer was a powered machine for squaring off a block of stone. Like a wood planer, but heavier-duty. No more need for big guys with chisels. Huge increase in productivity. But the market didn't grow, because stone lintels were a minor building component and cheaper stone lintels didn't mean more demand for them. So most of the workers lost their jobs. Those three outcomes still apply to many cases of computerization.
Iv 9y ago
>specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering. Dafuq? What do they think marxism was a reaction to? Have they never heard of the theory of alienation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
- zzzeek 9y ago
  I would suggest reading the article beyond the second paragraph. To avoid the HN snark police (oops), here is a relevant passage: > They are definitely right about the long period of painful adjustment! The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million. The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
  - elipsey 9y ago
    Yeah, I also misunderstood this at first. The article begins by _rebutting_ the claim that automation did not cause changes in the employment market that were disruptive and destabilizing. The thesis seems to be that we should consult historians, not just economists, on this subject.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      I would actually claim that technologists are more important than historians but in general agree that economist does not understand what is going on.
      - coliveira 9y ago
        Modern economy theory is laughable when looked from a historical perspective. All modern economic theories look at society as in stable equilibrium, since they believe that prices tend to equilibrium by nature. Of course you just need to look at history to verify that such equilibrium is nothing more than momentary, the big economic changes really happening as the result of unexpected disruption, like world wars, "unpredictable" banking collapses, etc.
otakucode 9y ago
Yeah, the claim the Industrial Revolution did not lead to major social upheaval... I don't know how anyone with any knowledge of history could say such a thing. My knowledge of history is pretty spotty, and fairly focused on only certain aspects of society, but even in that narrow focus the Industrial Revolution was of gigantic import. Before the Industrial Revolution, families lived, slept, and screwed, in common rooms. Homes didn't have bedrooms except for the aristocracy. Sex was a part of life like eating, something ever-present. When kids hit adolescence, they became apprentices (if not working on their families farm directly) and were paid a wage high enough that they could raise any children they sired. Everything changed with factories. Factory owners didn't want to pay adolescent workers enough to feed a family on. Society said "the machines are doing the real work" so wouldn't defend them. In stepped religion and secular medical 'science' of the time. As more and more urban families of factory workers were literally starving or having to abandon babies and the like, something had to be done. So they decided to try to kill sex. The religious authorities got together and started preaching about the evils of peoples 'animal urges'. They completely re-wrote their interpretation of the story of Onan to be a man punished for disobeying god to a man punished for 'spilling the seed'. Whereas previously only saints were even though capable of actual sexual abstinence, it was stressed as not just possible but important to the public for the first time. The secular medical community concurred and assisted. They reported that masturbation would drive you insane and eventually kill you. They advocated for giving children separate bedrooms so that the facts of human biology could be hidden from them. They recommended extreme corporal punishment for any children given to curiosities about 'sensual matters' (this extended to things like liking candy and whatnot - children of the day were viewed as basically barely trainable animals, slaves to their animal urges that could only be civilized through adequate beatings). Families often traded their children to other families - because they were afraid they would not be able to beat their own children savagely enough. We still carry all of these ideas with us today. We still find sexual matters difficult to talk about, view it as an annoyance to be minimized, hidden, or eliminated from life. The Industrial Revolution gave us this. What will we lose for the automation revolution? I already see society saying McDonalds workers and others require no reasonable pay because 'the machines make the work easy'. The New Deal remedied a lot of that kind of social problem 100 years ago, but today any HINT of that kind of policy would be decried as socialist and never even discussed. I fully expect a return to 16 hour days 6 days a week with the entire family working while barely earning enough to feed themselves. We are well on our way to it. And people have done it before, they will do it again. Only thing time, the prior remedies won't even be discussed, much less attempted.
notahacker 9y ago
If we're blaming industrialisation for everything from labour disputes involving a few shootings to full-blown communism in largely pre-industrial countries, it's probably worth noting that revolutions and war were the rule rather than the exception for the previous few millenia as well. What was novel - albeit so novel it took generations to filter through - was universal education, the welfare state and the lifting of the majority of the population above subsistence incomes.
- stretchwithme 9y ago
  Amen. Hans Rosling did a great job explaining all that progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  What was novel was company towns, cartels (Trusts) turning numerous industries into monopolies, etc. A lot of it really does curl one's toes (I'm just reading a Forbes collection of history articles.) Yes peasant revolts happened before this. There was an old cruel aristocracy, and then a new, industrial aristocracy which was inexperienced, fumbling and cruel. Industrialization wasn't the first harsh transition in human history, but who argued it was?
- coolgeek 9y ago
  > labour disputes involving a few shootings Like, what's a few dead employees between friends?
acdanger 9y ago
That sentence fragment you cite leaves out that this is the view of "economists," not the author's. This claim is addressed and rebutted further down the page. > Many economists say there is no need to worry. They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
jalayir 9y ago
You also missed out violence inflicted on colonies, in Asia and Africa.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  And South/Central America
trhway 9y ago
>Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. interesting that it also correlated with emergence of national identities in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe). There is some parallel here to the nationalistic anti-globalization movements starting to rise today.
narrator 9y ago
A good fictionalization of the events surrounding technological change undermining the existing social order, at least in the late 19th century, is Dostoyevsky's "The Devils". In that book they have the old landed gentry being slowly undermined by technology and new ideas from the west while these younger wild eyed engineers and intellectual radicals are growing up ominously in the next generation.
im2nguyen 9y ago
What I find interesting is that the second paragraph starts with: >They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering. Which is then followed by this in the 4th paragraph: >The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million.

aswanson 9y ago

Yeah, I struggle with this squaring this disruption with a generally libertarian economic stance. If we truly are at the edge of a disruption that will make the vast portion of workers under or unemployed, what does that mean in terms of social stability and survival for those people?

maxxxxx 9y ago
In the 1800s and early 1900s at least some people could emigrate to countries like the US where there was still a lot of open space. Even that's not an option this time.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  We are not running low on "open space" at all. The habitable area of the planet is vast. Many of the emigrants of the 1800s ended up settling "new" land in the US. But there's vast territories around the world that are extremely inexpensive. Since the 1800s we have grown more dependent on the services provided by the state in urban areas.
  - malandrew 9y ago
    The problem isn't the abundance or lack of open space, it's the fact that the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive.
    - vkou 9y ago
      This. There's a reason that communist revolutions were fueled by a desire for bread, peace, and land. In the start of the 20th century, you could make a decent living if you owned nothing but the land you lived on. Nowadays, you really can't.
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        I wonder what happens if we get robots that can provide a complete living off some plot of land. Like agriculture, energy and whatever you need. So in theory you could live autonomously then. Somehow I think the owning class will come up with ways to make this illegal or impossible.
        PeterisP 9y ago
        Why would robots make a difference? Currently, you can't really live off of a plot of land alone, but you'll be living quite well if you also own a bunch of high tech machinery to farm it efficiently. For a well-off Ferrari-owning farmer, the Ferrari is likely not among the most expensive vehicles he owns, the tractors/combines/whatever cost the big bucks. That's what the poster above meant by "the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive", and owning these robots would be the massive amount of capital; you'd be able to sustain yourself because (and if) you'd have a lot of very expensive robots, not because you just had some land; and you'd also be able to sustain yourself by just investing the value of these robots.
evanlivingston 9y ago
Libertarianism doesn't provide a good methodology for prioritizing the well-being of disinenfranchized person's, so If your ethics tell you that preserving property relations are less important than elevating the condition of all humans, then perhaps it is time to evaluate alternative economic stances that prioritize property less than people.
- etplayer 9y ago
  One such alternative would seem to be Proudhon's anarchism (mutualism) or even Marx's (or his predecessor's) Communism, though I know this is generally an unpopular response, I see no reason why it has no merit.
yourapostasy 9y ago
I'm not seeing good responses from libertarians regarding the inbalance in how law is practiced; would appreciate pointers to write ups of more effective libertarian-style remedies. That is, corporations with concentrations of power are treated by libertarians as possessing equal standing with individuals in a court of law. In practice, that is absolutely not how it works out. Yet, many a libertarian response to various problem spaces is "the courts will work it out!", in a deus ex machina style conclusion. Spend any appreciable time (>= 10 years) running a business, and you'll probably observe the same: I've yet to meet a business owner who subscribes to the "equal under law" libertarian ideal, everyone I've spoken with agrees that larger concentrations of wealth and power commensurately enjoy greater access and privileges in the court systems around the world that are unobtanium for smaller entities. I've heard the libertarian response of "we're just not capitalist enough" applied to this problem domain; look to US-style private arbitration to see how that's turning out. I've never been a fan of the "no true Scotsman" approach, anyways. Any libertarian-oriented remedies that realistically acknowledge how humans practice acquiring and deploying power of various forms would be appreciated.
- Clubber 9y ago
  From what I gather, there are really two facets of libertarianism. The social libertarianism, meaning let people do what they want, stop banning everything, drug war is futile, etc. Then there is the economic libertarianism, which means keep the government out of most, if not all business dealings. Deregulate, etc. I highly suspect people are much more interested in the first, but not really the second. Interests who stand to benefit from the second are selling them as a package deal and we will end up only getting the second. In other words, the arrest machine will keep running, but businesses will be free to fleece customers, government and employees with impunity. Surprising though, regulation is intended to save capitalism, not hurt it, at least in the long term. If capitalism runs down a path where it no longer benefits the vast majority of citizens in any given country, there will be hell to pay resulting in the end of capitalism. That would be a shame too, properly regulated capitalism is a really great system.
- tudorconstantin 9y ago
  Maybe if the laws were closer to what libertarians would like, this equality in front of it would be achievable. The basic libertarian philosophy regarding law says the only enforcing laws should concern the non aggression principle.
coliveira 9y ago
Economic libertarianism is the XXI century version of Leibnitz optimism of the XVIII century, which was so eloquently critiqued by Voltaire in Candide -- with Capitalism replacing God. They just believe that capitalism is the best of all possible systems and if we just blindly follow its rules everything will be fine and well, it doesn't matter how many people suffer in the meantime.
- asdffdsa321 9y ago
  Would it kill you to join everyone else in the 21st century and use numbers instead of romance numerals
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
    FYI, many countries/languages write centuries this way (e.g la langue de Voltaire)
    - freehunter 9y ago
      English-speaking countries? Because as a native English speaker, I have no problem reading their words but I have no idea what kind of numbers they're trying to express.
      - cicero 9y ago
        Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals
        freehunter 9y ago
        Yeah I know they're roman numerals but I can't read roman numerals without significant effort. It's bad form to include large roman numerals in English text. The majority of English speakers aren't going to know roman numerals beyond 10.
narrator 9y ago
The libertarian would say that if the general public gets access to advanced robotics then there will be enormous prosperity. For example, imagine if you could buy a robot that would survey your backyard, order equipment from amazon, start planting food, set up irrigation, harvest and deliver it to a neighbors automatically? Free locally grown food for everyone. Now, isn't that awesome? You could also rent a robot that would find water, dig wells, trench, put in pipes, etc. The possibilities are endless to take PRODUCTION of goods out of the hands of specialized highly capitalized organizations and into the hands of anybody who can rent a robot. The problem is is that a robot this advanced could also be used for very sophisticated bad purposes, so you're going to have lots of regulation and big corporations will only be able to use these robots and you'll have to buy things they produce with whatever meager wages they let you have.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  How do you pay for the robot if you're not working?
  - narrator 9y ago
    Just take out a loan. The food cost savings and excess production will pay for the loan and they can repo the robot if you don't pay. The robot will even be able to tell you if it's likely to be cash flow positive.
    - gloverkcn 9y ago
      Only people working would qualify for a loan. Those people would have more prosperity until the robots cratered all wages and prices, being free labor and flooding the market with excess. When the prices crash a large number of people with robots will be unable to pay back the loan. Their robots will be repossessed. They will now be out of a job and with no robot. The poor would get left over food from the kindness of people with robots? They'll certainly never work again.
      - narrator 9y ago

eighthnate 9y ago

> but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Empires fell during this time in western europe. And we had a civil war in the US. > Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. You forgot the mass extermination of natives in the US due primarily to industrialization. And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined. The nations first to industrialize benefited immensely at the expense of others. But it was extremely bloody in the US as well.

DamnYuppie 9y ago
Can you elaborate further on how the extermination of the natives was driven by industrialization. Having lived and traveled all over the west it is predominately, agrarian, large tracts given over for cattle. I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land.
- digikata 9y ago
  I'm not pushing for any particular interpretation here, but that cattle process could be viewed as early industrialized animal production made possible by the railroad. Graze in open areas, drive a bunch a cattle to centralized markets for transport/slaughter.
- eighthnate 9y ago
  > I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land. Industrialization is what prompted and allwed ships to bring millions of europeans to the US. It's what allowed railroads to ship millions to the midwest and the west. And of course the desire for oil/resources and farmland/etc. Industrialization is what allowed our armies to wipe out and clear the natives west of the mississippi.
ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
The vast majority of the decimation of the Native American population took place before the industrial revolution.

educationcto 9y ago

I think you'd have to count the American Civil War as a conflict caused at least in part by the industrial revolution, which would dramatically increase the toll it took in North America.

Clubber 9y ago
The cotton gin was textbook automation. In a strange twist of fate, it actually increased the demand for labor. Because it was very labor intensive to remove the seeds from a cotton boll, cotton wasn't a very profitable industry. After the gin (short for engine, what developers call automation engines), demand for labor and land skyrocketed. The cotton gin is an example of an automation removing the need for labor (deseeding cotton) and subsequently creating a greater need for labor elsewhere (planting and harvesting). Of course, in this example, the increased labor demand ultimately resulted in 720K deaths.
- duality 9y ago
  Improved efficiency increasing rather than decreasing demand for the newly more efficient resource is called "Jevons paradox".[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- Animats 9y ago
  As I've mentioned before, there's a book from 1926, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", which outlines the three basic cases of what happens when new technology is introduced. Their examples are the Linotype, the glass-bottle blowing machine, and the stone planer. The Linotype was a win for printing workers. Typesetting had been bottlenecking the process, and with fast typesetting, book and newspaper prices came down, and the volume of printed material increased enormously. That's the good case. The glass-bottle blowing machine is the not-so-good case. Bottle-blowing used to take a team of five people trained to work together and manipulate molten glass, blowpipe, and mold with tight coordination. This was a skilled trade and paid well, but bottles were expensive. Automatic bottle-making machines could make bottles rapidly with minimal labor. Bottle sales went up, and the bottle business grew, but the skilled trade was dead. Most of the workers were shoveling sand in one end or taking bottles out the other. This didn't take much skill. Operating the machines was not too hard. You probably needed a maintenance guy who really understood them, but only one for many machines. So most of the skilled jobs went away, replaced by low-paid entry level jobs. The worst case was the stone planer. Back when brick was the key building material, stone lintels were used over doors and windows to provide structural support for the bricks above. Stone was chipped by hand by big guys with big hammers and big chisels to make flat, rectangular stone beams. The stone planer was a powered machine for squaring off a block of stone. Like a wood planer, but heavier-duty. No more need for big guys with chisels. Huge increase in productivity. But the market didn't grow, because stone lintels were a minor building component and cheaper stone lintels didn't mean more demand for them. So most of the workers lost their jobs. Those three outcomes still apply to many cases of computerization.

Iv 9y ago

>specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering. Dafuq? What do they think marxism was a reaction to? Have they never heard of the theory of alienation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

zzzeek 9y ago
I would suggest reading the article beyond the second paragraph. To avoid the HN snark police (oops), here is a relevant passage: > They are definitely right about the long period of painful adjustment! The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million. The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
- elipsey 9y ago
  Yeah, I also misunderstood this at first. The article begins by _rebutting_ the claim that automation did not cause changes in the employment market that were disruptive and destabilizing. The thesis seems to be that we should consult historians, not just economists, on this subject.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    I would actually claim that technologists are more important than historians but in general agree that economist does not understand what is going on.
    - coliveira 9y ago
      Modern economy theory is laughable when looked from a historical perspective. All modern economic theories look at society as in stable equilibrium, since they believe that prices tend to equilibrium by nature. Of course you just need to look at history to verify that such equilibrium is nothing more than momentary, the big economic changes really happening as the result of unexpected disruption, like world wars, "unpredictable" banking collapses, etc.

otakucode 9y ago

Yeah, the claim the Industrial Revolution did not lead to major social upheaval... I don't know how anyone with any knowledge of history could say such a thing. My knowledge of history is pretty spotty, and fairly focused on only certain aspects of society, but even in that narrow focus the Industrial Revolution was of gigantic import. Before the Industrial Revolution, families lived, slept, and screwed, in common rooms. Homes didn't have bedrooms except for the aristocracy. Sex was a part of life like eating, something ever-present. When kids hit adolescence, they became apprentices (if not working on their families farm directly) and were paid a wage high enough that they could raise any children they sired. Everything changed with factories. Factory owners didn't want to pay adolescent workers enough to feed a family on. Society said "the machines are doing the real work" so wouldn't defend them. In stepped religion and secular medical 'science' of the time. As more and more urban families of factory workers were literally starving or having to abandon babies and the like, something had to be done. So they decided to try to kill sex. The religious authorities got together and started preaching about the evils of peoples 'animal urges'. They completely re-wrote their interpretation of the story of Onan to be a man punished for disobeying god to a man punished for 'spilling the seed'. Whereas previously only saints were even though capable of actual sexual abstinence, it was stressed as not just possible but important to the public for the first time. The secular medical community concurred and assisted. They reported that masturbation would drive you insane and eventually kill you. They advocated for giving children separate bedrooms so that the facts of human biology could be hidden from them. They recommended extreme corporal punishment for any children given to curiosities about 'sensual matters' (this extended to things like liking candy and whatnot - children of the day were viewed as basically barely trainable animals, slaves to their animal urges that could only be civilized through adequate beatings). Families often traded their children to other families - because they were afraid they would not be able to beat their own children savagely enough. We still carry all of these ideas with us today. We still find sexual matters difficult to talk about, view it as an annoyance to be minimized, hidden, or eliminated from life. The Industrial Revolution gave us this. What will we lose for the automation revolution? I already see society saying McDonalds workers and others require no reasonable pay because 'the machines make the work easy'. The New Deal remedied a lot of that kind of social problem 100 years ago, but today any HINT of that kind of policy would be decried as socialist and never even discussed. I fully expect a return to 16 hour days 6 days a week with the entire family working while barely earning enough to feed themselves. We are well on our way to it. And people have done it before, they will do it again. Only thing time, the prior remedies won't even be discussed, much less attempted.

notahacker 9y ago

If we're blaming industrialisation for everything from labour disputes involving a few shootings to full-blown communism in largely pre-industrial countries, it's probably worth noting that revolutions and war were the rule rather than the exception for the previous few millenia as well. What was novel - albeit so novel it took generations to filter through - was universal education, the welfare state and the lifting of the majority of the population above subsistence incomes.

stretchwithme 9y ago
Amen. Hans Rosling did a great job explaining all that progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Nomentatus 9y ago
What was novel was company towns, cartels (Trusts) turning numerous industries into monopolies, etc. A lot of it really does curl one's toes (I'm just reading a Forbes collection of history articles.) Yes peasant revolts happened before this. There was an old cruel aristocracy, and then a new, industrial aristocracy which was inexperienced, fumbling and cruel. Industrialization wasn't the first harsh transition in human history, but who argued it was?
coolgeek 9y ago
> labour disputes involving a few shootings Like, what's a few dead employees between friends?

acdanger 9y ago

That sentence fragment you cite leaves out that this is the view of "economists," not the author's. This claim is addressed and rebutted further down the page. > Many economists say there is no need to worry. They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.

jalayir 9y ago

You also missed out violence inflicted on colonies, in Asia and Africa.

owebmaster 9y ago
And South/Central America

trhway 9y ago

>Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. interesting that it also correlated with emergence of national identities in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe). There is some parallel here to the nationalistic anti-globalization movements starting to rise today.

narrator 9y ago

A good fictionalization of the events surrounding technological change undermining the existing social order, at least in the late 19th century, is Dostoyevsky's "The Devils". In that book they have the old landed gentry being slowly undermined by technology and new ideas from the west while these younger wild eyed engineers and intellectual radicals are growing up ominously in the next generation.

im2nguyen 9y ago

What I find interesting is that the second paragraph starts with: >They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering. Which is then followed by this in the 4th paragraph: >The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million.