Comment by dofm
5 hours ago
Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.
The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour.
It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap.
Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job?
Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.
>In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.
source?
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
AFAIK that was massively flawed because it doesn't account for time spent doing various household chores or maintenance tasks. If you spent 4 hours making a shirt, that wouldn't count towards "hours worked", but if you worked a 2 hour job to buy a shirt it would.
9 replies →
Literally any history of the industrial revolution in Britain (and I imagine the USA)
Farmers went from working outside at a stable work pace (and in many cases farming a small patch of their own land as part payment, so eating at least functionally well) to being forced out of their farming work by the second agricultural revolution (leading to the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs etc.) and to living in cramped industrial slums, working in appallingly dangerous and polluted factories, long hours, terrible food, toxic chemicals, severe health issues.
Subsequent infant mortality in industrial area families was about twice the rate in industrial areas as it was in rural areas because of appalling living conditions and poor food.
It's the underpinning story of the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.
An interesting link here:
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/vict...
But this is well-studied history. The industrial revolution did not liberate the poor until labour law changed to stop them being expendable; living standards took the best part of a hundred years, until as late as the early 1900s, to return to a level where people were as healthy as they were or to live as long.