7 ms·

I struggle to understand how anyone really believes this is a real outcome of automation. I think you're being entirely too optimistic.

idontpost 3y ago
[dead]
IMTDb 3y ago
I mean, Luddites had the exact same kind of fear about the steam machines, yet the conditions of the workers have significantly improved with the industrial revolution. It took some time, but virtually all measurable metrics have improved: real wages, access to food / healthcare / lawyers, children education, social mobility, ... . More recently, computers have already automated a huge number of jobs, yet the unemployment rate remains around 3%, proving that people are doing "something". And that something is definitely not doing data copying, manual additions and computations, etc.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  > I mean, Luddites had the exact same kind of fear about the steam machines, yet the conditions of the workers have significantly improved with the industrial revolution. No, what actually happened is decades of declines in the safety and material condition of workers, children forced into factories, organization and violent rebellion by labor unions, and a peace carved out with mass enfranchisement, the formation of working class political parties, and the passage of labor laws. People who say this kind of stuff always have a “draw the rest of the owl” conception of history. Funnily enough, there was also a corollary movement to the Luddites in France that almost no one knows about because a. they won more of these battles b. French workers did not face as much of a decline in their standard of living as English workers did in the same period as a result.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > No, what actually happened is decades of declines in the safety and material condition of workers The thing that came before the industrial revolution was feudalism. Life expectancy increased dramatically as a result of industrialization. > children forced into factories They weren't being kidnapped, they were getting paid. This was a "problem" because it became more lucrative to work in a factory than go to school, so prohibitions on child labor and mandatory school attendance laws became widespread during the industrial revolution. > organization and violent rebellion by labor unions This was mainly attributable to governments not enforcing antitrust laws or allowing employers to get away with violence themselves. It was basically gang violence by rival gangs when the real solution should have been trust busting. > the passage of labor laws Most labor laws were retroactive legislative enactment of soon to be widespread employment conditions, because once employers had to compete with each other they had to provide competitive working conditions. Legislators opportunistically took credit for changes that were in the process of happening regardless.
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      It’s quite clear that you haven’t read anything about this and are arguing strictly from your ideological priors. For starters, the end of Feudalism led to workers being forced from rural settings into concentrated urban ones, which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition. In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism. Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death. The rest of your comment is more of the “draw the rest of the owl” history that I alluded to in my comment, unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > For starters, the end of Feudalism led to workers being forced from rural settings into concentrated urban ones Forced. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. > which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition. And yet average lifespans went up, because what came before was even worse. And then the world gained the germ theory of disease and penicillin and they went up even more. > In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism. You can clearly see the start of the industrial revolution on this life expectancy chart, and the consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Life_expectancy_by_world_region,_from_1770_to_2018.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li... > Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death. Dispossessed of the lands? The peasants didn't own the land. They were serfs who genuinely didn't have a choice because the alternative was to be executed or left to "starvation and death." Industrialization was the first time they actually had a choice. There were still agricultural workers -- somebody was growing the food -- but now you could go into the city, which generally paid better. Or paid at all, contrary to historical norms. And you had a choice of what you did. Working long hours in a factory wasn't as easy as working for a grocer, but it paid better, and people chose it willingly. This was the thing that truly ended slavery in the first world -- before if you were a slave or a serf and you ran off, you would be left to die alone in the wilderness. Now you could run off to the city and get a job in a factory, and live, and make money. The old system was defunct because the plantation owners were never going to keep people there by force once escape meant profit rather than death. > unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments. This was obviously the period during which unions entered the scene, but notice that unions have significantly declined in the US since then and "labor laws" like the minimum wage haven't kept up with inflation, and yet minimum wage jobs are uncommon because employers still have to compete for labor even in the absence of unions or labor laws. The place where this falls down is when they don't, i.e. when you have a monopoly or a company town which is the only employer for some occupation or region. Which is a legitimate problem if you have a regulatory environment that allows that to happen, but the solution to it isn't "labor laws" or unions, because a monopoly is a problem for more than just workers. You have to bust them up and prevent them from forming. At which point the rest of that stuff is just inefficient ways to mitigate the consequences a problem that should be solved properly instead.
  - alzamos 3y ago
    A good book on this topic was Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress”. Lots of illuminating examples of how technological progress immediately made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc. A few memorable anecdotes off the top of my head: - In one instance, during the Industrial Revolution, they quoted a letter from a lord (owner of a coal mine) who said mines would stop being profitable if children were banned/restricted from working in them. Some new parts of mines accessible thanks to advances in dredging technology were narrow, very suited to children’s small bodies, and digging the tunnels to the size of an adult cost too much. There was a complaint that some children were suffering brain damage due to chronic sleep deprivation and being forced to push mine carts in tunnels with their heads. - In the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there were proven advances in milling and agricultural technology in England, making grain production cheaper and more efficient. However, analysis of peasant skeletons showed signs of more and more malnutrition, as well as signs of damage from work. The author says the prevalent theory is that because the margin-per-hour-worked of a peasant increased, local lords had more incentive to work them harder (not an economist/historian, so can only take this at face value). Not having anywhere else to go (indeed, in multiple instances even during the industrial revolutions, it was either illegal or difficult to change jobs), they just got worse living conditions. Additionally, peasant access to the ever-more-efficient mills was tightly controlled and expensive, to the point where peasants found it better to just mill grain by hand at home. The lords/priests promptly made this illegal and would perform periodic raids to confiscate their equipment. - Both during the construction of the Panama Canal and in the major industrial cities of England, dense worker concentrations and poor sanitation caused workers to die in droves and decrease the efficiency of the construction/factories. In the England case, diseases that hadn’t been seen in years had resurfaced. It took a long time for workers to finally convince management/government to invest in sanitation/health/sewage, which not only kept people alive and healthy, but increased productivity and completed the canal. Of course, a lot of this is mixed with differing hierarchies or political scenarios, and isn’t a comprehensive before->after of every advancement etc. However, it certainly put a heavy dose of nuance on the optimism behind technological advancement, and made me wonder if we could have pre-emptively enacted the necessary social/political changes which allowed for the wide-spread benefitting of technology without first going through the preceding periods of intensified suffering.
- sumedh 3y ago
  > yet the unemployment rate remains around 3%, proving that people are doing "something". Are the salaries comparable to what people were getting for minimum wage jobs in the past?
  - dantheman 3y ago
    Far higher and the cost of goods has gone down while quality has gone up.

idontpost 3y ago

[dead]

IMTDb 3y ago

I mean, Luddites had the exact same kind of fear about the steam machines, yet the conditions of the workers have significantly improved with the industrial revolution. It took some time, but virtually all measurable metrics have improved: real wages, access to food / healthcare / lawyers, children education, social mobility, ... . More recently, computers have already automated a huge number of jobs, yet the unemployment rate remains around 3%, proving that people are doing "something". And that something is definitely not doing data copying, manual additions and computations, etc.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
> I mean, Luddites had the exact same kind of fear about the steam machines, yet the conditions of the workers have significantly improved with the industrial revolution. No, what actually happened is decades of declines in the safety and material condition of workers, children forced into factories, organization and violent rebellion by labor unions, and a peace carved out with mass enfranchisement, the formation of working class political parties, and the passage of labor laws. People who say this kind of stuff always have a “draw the rest of the owl” conception of history. Funnily enough, there was also a corollary movement to the Luddites in France that almost no one knows about because a. they won more of these battles b. French workers did not face as much of a decline in their standard of living as English workers did in the same period as a result.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > No, what actually happened is decades of declines in the safety and material condition of workers The thing that came before the industrial revolution was feudalism. Life expectancy increased dramatically as a result of industrialization. > children forced into factories They weren't being kidnapped, they were getting paid. This was a "problem" because it became more lucrative to work in a factory than go to school, so prohibitions on child labor and mandatory school attendance laws became widespread during the industrial revolution. > organization and violent rebellion by labor unions This was mainly attributable to governments not enforcing antitrust laws or allowing employers to get away with violence themselves. It was basically gang violence by rival gangs when the real solution should have been trust busting. > the passage of labor laws Most labor laws were retroactive legislative enactment of soon to be widespread employment conditions, because once employers had to compete with each other they had to provide competitive working conditions. Legislators opportunistically took credit for changes that were in the process of happening regardless.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    It’s quite clear that you haven’t read anything about this and are arguing strictly from your ideological priors. For starters, the end of Feudalism led to workers being forced from rural settings into concentrated urban ones, which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition. In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism. Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death. The rest of your comment is more of the “draw the rest of the owl” history that I alluded to in my comment, unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > For starters, the end of Feudalism led to workers being forced from rural settings into concentrated urban ones Forced. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. > which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition. And yet average lifespans went up, because what came before was even worse. And then the world gained the germ theory of disease and penicillin and they went up even more. > In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism. You can clearly see the start of the industrial revolution on this life expectancy chart, and the consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Life_expectancy_by_world_region,_from_1770_to_2018.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li... > Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death. Dispossessed of the lands? The peasants didn't own the land. They were serfs who genuinely didn't have a choice because the alternative was to be executed or left to "starvation and death." Industrialization was the first time they actually had a choice. There were still agricultural workers -- somebody was growing the food -- but now you could go into the city, which generally paid better. Or paid at all, contrary to historical norms. And you had a choice of what you did. Working long hours in a factory wasn't as easy as working for a grocer, but it paid better, and people chose it willingly. This was the thing that truly ended slavery in the first world -- before if you were a slave or a serf and you ran off, you would be left to die alone in the wilderness. Now you could run off to the city and get a job in a factory, and live, and make money. The old system was defunct because the plantation owners were never going to keep people there by force once escape meant profit rather than death. > unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments. This was obviously the period during which unions entered the scene, but notice that unions have significantly declined in the US since then and "labor laws" like the minimum wage haven't kept up with inflation, and yet minimum wage jobs are uncommon because employers still have to compete for labor even in the absence of unions or labor laws. The place where this falls down is when they don't, i.e. when you have a monopoly or a company town which is the only employer for some occupation or region. Which is a legitimate problem if you have a regulatory environment that allows that to happen, but the solution to it isn't "labor laws" or unions, because a monopoly is a problem for more than just workers. You have to bust them up and prevent them from forming. At which point the rest of that stuff is just inefficient ways to mitigate the consequences a problem that should be solved properly instead.
- alzamos 3y ago
  A good book on this topic was Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress”. Lots of illuminating examples of how technological progress immediately made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc. A few memorable anecdotes off the top of my head: - In one instance, during the Industrial Revolution, they quoted a letter from a lord (owner of a coal mine) who said mines would stop being profitable if children were banned/restricted from working in them. Some new parts of mines accessible thanks to advances in dredging technology were narrow, very suited to children’s small bodies, and digging the tunnels to the size of an adult cost too much. There was a complaint that some children were suffering brain damage due to chronic sleep deprivation and being forced to push mine carts in tunnels with their heads. - In the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there were proven advances in milling and agricultural technology in England, making grain production cheaper and more efficient. However, analysis of peasant skeletons showed signs of more and more malnutrition, as well as signs of damage from work. The author says the prevalent theory is that because the margin-per-hour-worked of a peasant increased, local lords had more incentive to work them harder (not an economist/historian, so can only take this at face value). Not having anywhere else to go (indeed, in multiple instances even during the industrial revolutions, it was either illegal or difficult to change jobs), they just got worse living conditions. Additionally, peasant access to the ever-more-efficient mills was tightly controlled and expensive, to the point where peasants found it better to just mill grain by hand at home. The lords/priests promptly made this illegal and would perform periodic raids to confiscate their equipment. - Both during the construction of the Panama Canal and in the major industrial cities of England, dense worker concentrations and poor sanitation caused workers to die in droves and decrease the efficiency of the construction/factories. In the England case, diseases that hadn’t been seen in years had resurfaced. It took a long time for workers to finally convince management/government to invest in sanitation/health/sewage, which not only kept people alive and healthy, but increased productivity and completed the canal. Of course, a lot of this is mixed with differing hierarchies or political scenarios, and isn’t a comprehensive before->after of every advancement etc. However, it certainly put a heavy dose of nuance on the optimism behind technological advancement, and made me wonder if we could have pre-emptively enacted the necessary social/political changes which allowed for the wide-spread benefitting of technology without first going through the preceding periods of intensified suffering.
sumedh 3y ago
> yet the unemployment rate remains around 3%, proving that people are doing "something". Are the salaries comparable to what people were getting for minimum wage jobs in the past?
- dantheman 3y ago
  Far higher and the cost of goods has gone down while quality has gone up.