>Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doin

>Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary. Mechanisation of the textile industry led to vast increases in the quantity of production. Prior to the industrial revolution, most peasants would have owned only one set of clothes and replaced them only when they were entirely beyond repair. Cheap cloth created demand for wardrobes and dressers, because a lot of people were now in the peculiar position of owning more clothes than they could wear at once. The luddites were ultimately wrong because of Jevons paradox - labour efficiencies in the textile industry vastly increased the demand for their product, and with it their demand for labour. Hand-loom weavers didn't lose their livelihoods to the power loom, they just made ten times as much cloth for twice the wage. Automation and mechanisation in other manufacturing sectors likewise stimulated vastly increased consumer demand, contributing to a virtuous cycle of increasing profit, wages and living standards. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the efficiencies of mass-manufacturing gave ordinary people secure employment and access to a dizzying array of consumer goods. The more stuff we made, the more stuff we could afford to buy. I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. A lot of tech-heavy businesses seem to be startlingly close to zero-sum. Uber has decimated the taxi industry, but it doesn't seem to have vastly increased overall ridership - the most generous figures I've seen suggest perhaps a 40% increase in some markets. Google and Facebook have become multi-billion dollar companies through advertising revenue, but the overall growth of ad spending across all media has barely outpaced inflation, with the newspaper industry being the most obvious casualty. I can't think of many major tech companies that didn't kill an industry. I'd love to be proven wrong.