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Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was

Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors. My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.

guappa 3y ago
Serfs might decide to kill the local lord. And most local lords didn't have a huge standing army to prevent that. So you don't sound too correct.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution. There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really rare (outside of Switzerland). Even the 1381 "Great Revolt" in England, which called for the abolition of serfdom among other things, is evaluated by the World History Encyclopaedia [1] as "largely unsuccessful" despite having many factors in its favour: a rise in the bargaining power of surviving peasants after the Black Death, and peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows. And yet Wat Tyler's head ended up on a pike, and despite the poll tax being rolled back, serfdom as an institution remained. [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/Peasants'_Revolt/ https://www.worldhistory.org/Peasants'_Revolt/
  - guappa 3y ago
    https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchinaggio https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchinaggio
  - doktrin 3y ago
    > peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows The longbow's reputation as a hard-counter to heavy cavalry is, I think, a little context dependent. The famous set pieces like Poitiers, Agincourt, Crecy all featured favorable terrain - and in the case of Agincourt, favorable weather - ideal for massed fire into predictable funnels (where, strictly speaking, the longbow served first and foremost as a horse killer). All this to say, it's IMO a mischaracterization to imply the peasants in the aforementioned peasants revolt held the military edge relative to the crown and its allies. After the initial shock of the uprising, they were a clear underdog matched against a well resourced and ruthless opponent.
    - red_admiral 3y ago
      I agree entirely. Even with the longbow (or crossbow), a peasant uprising could maybe kill a few local lords and knights, but most of the time they would then find themselves very much the underdog against the forces that would be mobilized in response. We have to wait until gunpowder (for example Jan Zizka's Hussites - and even that was more an exception that proves the rule) for peasants, on average, to have a decent chance.
tivert 3y ago
>> And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution. > My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something. I think the real risk of C is that the economy changes to something radically different, where everything is capital and labor is (basically) no longer required. The whole B2C economy just withers and dies, and is replaced by an economy centered on elite fantasy fulfillment (e.g. Elon Musks monopolizing resources to build mega-projects for themselves, perhaps with a smallish community of human pets kept as an audience). There wouldn't be any serfs, because serfs had economic value to the medieval elites. But there may be a population of marginal people scraping by squatting and subsistence farming at the margins, hoping a mega-project doesn't displace them.

guappa 3y ago

Serfs might decide to kill the local lord. And most local lords didn't have a huge standing army to prevent that. So you don't sound too correct.

red_admiral 3y ago
With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution. There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really rare (outside of Switzerland). Even the 1381 "Great Revolt" in England, which called for the abolition of serfdom among other things, is evaluated by the World History Encyclopaedia [1] as "largely unsuccessful" despite having many factors in its favour: a rise in the bargaining power of surviving peasants after the Black Death, and peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows. And yet Wat Tyler's head ended up on a pike, and despite the poll tax being rolled back, serfdom as an institution remained. [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/Peasants'_Revolt/ https://www.worldhistory.org/Peasants'_Revolt/
- guappa 3y ago
  https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchinaggio https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchinaggio
- doktrin 3y ago
  > peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows The longbow's reputation as a hard-counter to heavy cavalry is, I think, a little context dependent. The famous set pieces like Poitiers, Agincourt, Crecy all featured favorable terrain - and in the case of Agincourt, favorable weather - ideal for massed fire into predictable funnels (where, strictly speaking, the longbow served first and foremost as a horse killer). All this to say, it's IMO a mischaracterization to imply the peasants in the aforementioned peasants revolt held the military edge relative to the crown and its allies. After the initial shock of the uprising, they were a clear underdog matched against a well resourced and ruthless opponent.
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    I agree entirely. Even with the longbow (or crossbow), a peasant uprising could maybe kill a few local lords and knights, but most of the time they would then find themselves very much the underdog against the forces that would be mobilized in response. We have to wait until gunpowder (for example Jan Zizka's Hussites - and even that was more an exception that proves the rule) for peasants, on average, to have a decent chance.

tivert 3y ago

>> And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution. > My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something. I think the real risk of C is that the economy changes to something radically different, where everything is capital and labor is (basically) no longer required. The whole B2C economy just withers and dies, and is replaced by an economy centered on elite fantasy fulfillment (e.g. Elon Musks monopolizing resources to build mega-projects for themselves, perhaps with a smallish community of human pets kept as an audience). There wouldn't be any serfs, because serfs had economic value to the medieval elites. But there may be a population of marginal people scraping by squatting and subsistence farming at the margins, hoping a mega-project doesn't displace them.