Comment by gruez
6 hours ago
>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?
6 hours ago
>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.
Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender. The etymology of "woman" is literally "weaving person", and those kinds of tasks were up to the mostly adult women who also wouldn't have been working in the fields, so it ends up being a wash when painting with a wide brush.
6 replies →
I mean, you only have to look at actual available salary and hours data to see that factory workers worked at least as long a day and longer than a farm day can even be, and in conditions that were unambiguously worse.
But even if this were not true it’s still not a working analogy for AI, which is going to eliminate employment, not just job roles. It’s the whole pitch for AGI.
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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.