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The makers of the machines that the Luddites protested must be assumed to have been an even higher skilled, smaller subset than the Luddites, thus equivalent to
by mseebach 15y ago
The makers of the machines that the Luddites protested must be assumed to have been an even higher skilled, smaller subset than the Luddites, thus equivalent to todays engineers/software developers etc.
It's obviously hard to be deterministic about but I would think it is safe to assume that having the unemployed Luddites 200 years distant helps a lot in deeming the technological developments then more "helpful" than the development today.
- greggman 15y agoThe machines that replaced the Luddites made it possible for a fashion industry to come into existence. That in turn created a couple orders of magnitude more jobs than were displaced by the jobs lost by the Luddites Similarly, the number jobs in existence around cars dwarfs the number of jobs lost from no longer using horses. I'm sure there are other examples. The problem is most articles complaining about the loss of one type of job only compare them to the direct effects (loss of cloth maker jobs vs maintenance of cloth making machine jobs). It's never that simple.
- randomdata 15y agoSimilarly, the number jobs in existence around cars dwarfs the number of jobs lost from no longer using horses. Some 90% of the population worked on farms before the horse was displaced. The automotive industry is significant, but not anywhere near that significant.
- mseebach 15y agoYes, the true benefit of automating and scaling agriculture was the freeing up of vast swathes of the population for being factory workers, thus enabling the industrial revolution. Which was that significant.