4 ms·

Comparing it to the industrial revolution is pretty direct. The industrial revolution resulted in a huge leap forward in the quality of the average human life.

by beloch 1y ago

Comparing it to the industrial revolution is pretty direct. The industrial revolution resulted in a huge leap forward in the quality of the average human life... eventually. It took a while to distribute the gains equally. Initially, it was a big step down and a huge increase in suffering for a lot of people. It took social advances to make technological advances work for (nearly) everybody. Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.

zpeti 1y ago
> Initially, it was a big step down Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere. We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives
- zmgsabst 1y ago
  It was worse for people like the Luddites, who had artisanal jobs replaced by machinery. They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
- achierius 1y ago
  They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible. Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
  - beloch 1y ago
    Labour laws were a big problem. e.g. In the early stages of the revolution in England, it was illegal to leave your job and take another one. It was a choice between poor pay/unsafe working conditions and jail. Even once workers won the right to find jobs elsewhere, pay was still so poor that entire families, including children, had to work for families to stay afloat.
  - zpeti 1y ago
    > which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible this is exactly the point. Your children might only starve every 10 years, but when they do, a consistent factory work seems like a much better life. Just because you had 9/10 non-starving years doesn't mean the starving year is ok.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  Feudalism isn't necessarily that bad if your environment is stable. A lot of people moved into industry during the 18th and 19th centuries not because working the land was so awful to begin with, but because it became increasingly untenable as formerly public lands were privatized by legal fiat, and private landholdings were aggressively consolidated. Around the beginning of the Industrial revolution, the number of private landowners in the UK fell by over 80%, from about 1 person out of every 60 to 1 in 600 or so (the population grew about 25% over the same period). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act has an OK overview but is a bit thin and just a starting point. The political upheavals still echo in British politics today. I think it's fair to say that some of the changes were driven by the lure of profit (and associated national revenue) and some out of a desire to avert a domestic repeat of the American and French revolutions.
- BugheadTorpeda5 1y ago
  [flagged]
- keybored 1y ago
  You talk about dreamy and “this image of”. What are you sources for these views? Your own images?
sorcerer-mar 1y ago
It didn't just "take a while." It took 150 years of intense reformation efforts that potentially never would've come to fruition if not for the hard-reset of two World Wars. I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.
- atoav 1y ago
  I think prosperity is what you have to tear from the forceful claws of those who profit if the masses do not have it. A monarch in feudal time in the best of cases wants his people well off, but they never want them so well off that the caste directly below him in the system gets nervous, as such people stay poor unless they give the monarch a good reason to support them. The hierarchy needs to be maintained. Of course the aristocrats can afford more when they extract more of the people. Louis XIV's finance ministor on that part: > The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. The part where the people got their share of prosperity was called the French Revolution. Similar dynamics happend for slightly different reason under capitalism, where during the industrialization people were exploited by the capital class — not because they needed to maintain a hierarchy, but simply because they get more if their workers get less. In that case prosperity only reached the people once they started to organize in unions and similar structures and fought for their rightful piece of the cookie. To underline how this was the opposite of what would automatically happen, here a quote by Jay Gould, a ruthless American railroad magnate of the 19th century: > I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. On the eve of the French Revolution, the top 1% of French society owned roughly 50% of the wealth. Today in the US you're closing in on 40% with a very clear trend of this proceeding forward,especially under the current administration. Only that today the wealthy have more tools to keep the poor in check by feeding them stories (e.g. the american dream) or having them fight amongst themselves (e.g. culture wars) and the cost of such propaganda should go down with LLMs.
TheGrognardling 1y ago
This is absolutely a crucial and salient point; call me an optimist, but I'm encouraged by the fact that it seems as technological advancement has progressed throughout human history, the speed of responses has accelerated in conjunction with shortened timelines - steam and mechanization, electricity and mass production, telecommunications and media, digital information, and now artificial intelligence have respectively seen faster response times compared to each previous revolution. I think short-term suffering, or at the very least disruption (as we're seeing) is essentially inevitable, but with all of these preemptive frameworks being implemented, or at the very least discussed (though just the latter isn't really good enough at all, of course) in turnaround times that are unprecedented, I really do not foresee a techno-dystopia; however, again, perhaps that's just wishful thinking. Quite honestly, I think a pragmatic place to start, outside of theology and moral philosophy, is to make AI development necessarily adherent to some consortium of standards outlined by governments and implemented by boards within industries - like what we see with many engineering professions in the US and other countries.
- keybored 1y ago
  No, because it’s built on the false premise that the inequality following the industrial revolution ever stopped.[1] It’s easy for us to be optimists and shrug nonchalantly about the short-term (?) suffering when we don’t face the worst or even median pain that these changes bring. Very strong “you will suffer but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” vibes. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953142
keybored 1y ago
The gains have never been distributed equally. For a time wages for Western workers kept up with productivity (but inequality was still a thing). Then the neoliberal turn happened in the 1970’s. (Which was started by a military coup in Chile.) Since then wages in the West have been stagnant. In that same time period wages also rose for the third/second world workers. In no small part due to China’s one billion people (which is not neoliberal). We’re still in the neoliberal phase, the backlash against the New Deal and other reforms of post-WWII. Then we now have within this order the AI boom/hype. > Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Here’s the difference between the perspective that “progress” is inevitable and we will (out of our generosity) try/hope for reducing the inevitable suffering of those (other) people. Another perspective is that progress that doesn’t serve people is not progress. The root problem is the inequality that never was fixed.

by beloch 1y ago

zpeti 1y ago

> Initially, it was a big step down Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere. We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives

zmgsabst 1y ago
It was worse for people like the Luddites, who had artisanal jobs replaced by machinery. They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
achierius 1y ago
They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible. Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
- beloch 1y ago
  Labour laws were a big problem. e.g. In the early stages of the revolution in England, it was illegal to leave your job and take another one. It was a choice between poor pay/unsafe working conditions and jail. Even once workers won the right to find jobs elsewhere, pay was still so poor that entire families, including children, had to work for families to stay afloat.
- zpeti 1y ago
  > which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible this is exactly the point. Your children might only starve every 10 years, but when they do, a consistent factory work seems like a much better life. Just because you had 9/10 non-starving years doesn't mean the starving year is ok.
anigbrowl 1y ago
Feudalism isn't necessarily that bad if your environment is stable. A lot of people moved into industry during the 18th and 19th centuries not because working the land was so awful to begin with, but because it became increasingly untenable as formerly public lands were privatized by legal fiat, and private landholdings were aggressively consolidated. Around the beginning of the Industrial revolution, the number of private landowners in the UK fell by over 80%, from about 1 person out of every 60 to 1 in 600 or so (the population grew about 25% over the same period). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act has an OK overview but is a bit thin and just a starting point. The political upheavals still echo in British politics today. I think it's fair to say that some of the changes were driven by the lure of profit (and associated national revenue) and some out of a desire to avert a domestic repeat of the American and French revolutions.
BugheadTorpeda5 1y ago
[flagged]
keybored 1y ago
You talk about dreamy and “this image of”. What are you sources for these views? Your own images?

sorcerer-mar 1y ago

It didn't just "take a while." It took 150 years of intense reformation efforts that potentially never would've come to fruition if not for the hard-reset of two World Wars. I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.

atoav 1y ago
I think prosperity is what you have to tear from the forceful claws of those who profit if the masses do not have it. A monarch in feudal time in the best of cases wants his people well off, but they never want them so well off that the caste directly below him in the system gets nervous, as such people stay poor unless they give the monarch a good reason to support them. The hierarchy needs to be maintained. Of course the aristocrats can afford more when they extract more of the people. Louis XIV's finance ministor on that part: > The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. The part where the people got their share of prosperity was called the French Revolution. Similar dynamics happend for slightly different reason under capitalism, where during the industrialization people were exploited by the capital class — not because they needed to maintain a hierarchy, but simply because they get more if their workers get less. In that case prosperity only reached the people once they started to organize in unions and similar structures and fought for their rightful piece of the cookie. To underline how this was the opposite of what would automatically happen, here a quote by Jay Gould, a ruthless American railroad magnate of the 19th century: > I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. On the eve of the French Revolution, the top 1% of French society owned roughly 50% of the wealth. Today in the US you're closing in on 40% with a very clear trend of this proceeding forward,especially under the current administration. Only that today the wealthy have more tools to keep the poor in check by feeding them stories (e.g. the american dream) or having them fight amongst themselves (e.g. culture wars) and the cost of such propaganda should go down with LLMs.

TheGrognardling 1y ago

This is absolutely a crucial and salient point; call me an optimist, but I'm encouraged by the fact that it seems as technological advancement has progressed throughout human history, the speed of responses has accelerated in conjunction with shortened timelines - steam and mechanization, electricity and mass production, telecommunications and media, digital information, and now artificial intelligence have respectively seen faster response times compared to each previous revolution. I think short-term suffering, or at the very least disruption (as we're seeing) is essentially inevitable, but with all of these preemptive frameworks being implemented, or at the very least discussed (though just the latter isn't really good enough at all, of course) in turnaround times that are unprecedented, I really do not foresee a techno-dystopia; however, again, perhaps that's just wishful thinking. Quite honestly, I think a pragmatic place to start, outside of theology and moral philosophy, is to make AI development necessarily adherent to some consortium of standards outlined by governments and implemented by boards within industries - like what we see with many engineering professions in the US and other countries.

keybored 1y ago
No, because it’s built on the false premise that the inequality following the industrial revolution ever stopped.[1] It’s easy for us to be optimists and shrug nonchalantly about the short-term (?) suffering when we don’t face the worst or even median pain that these changes bring. Very strong “you will suffer but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” vibes. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953142

keybored 1y ago

The gains have never been distributed equally. For a time wages for Western workers kept up with productivity (but inequality was still a thing). Then the neoliberal turn happened in the 1970’s. (Which was started by a military coup in Chile.) Since then wages in the West have been stagnant. In that same time period wages also rose for the third/second world workers. In no small part due to China’s one billion people (which is not neoliberal). We’re still in the neoliberal phase, the backlash against the New Deal and other reforms of post-WWII. Then we now have within this order the AI boom/hype. > Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Here’s the difference between the perspective that “progress” is inevitable and we will (out of our generosity) try/hope for reducing the inevitable suffering of those (other) people. Another perspective is that progress that doesn’t serve people is not progress. The root problem is the inequality that never was fixed.