Comment by AngryData
19 hours ago
But the majority of people in the world are still working just as hard now as before the industrial revolution? Most of the labor rights activists of the 19th and 20th century spent their time advocating for working hours closer to their pre-industrial grandparents. Industrialization increased working hours with the promise that eventually everyone will have to work less hours once the equipment was built. And yet many generations later countries are talking about increasing retirement age, reducing worker rights, and wage theft is more prevalent than all other forms of theft combined.
What is AI going to do that industrialization and automation hasn't already made the same promises for?
Before the industrial revolution, you started working as soon as you could assist with anything (cooking meant firewood, washing clothes was by hand, etc.); you stopped working when you were too feeble, and only if you were lucky (or from another perspective, very unlucky) a lord's almshouse might look after you.
Life back then was a never-ending quest to make more calories, and you had to consume about 90% of what you made just to not starve (the other 10% went to the lords, the army, and very young children; though I'm oversimplifying here because farm animals also eat and you had to feed them). As total production was lower (and because "preservative" meant cats, alcohol, salt, and grain silos on mushroom-shaped pillars so rats couldn't get in, not industrial refrigeration and sodium benzoate etc.), this meant very different work schedule compare to today; but people were working at the limits of what biology would support, even if hours were fewer (no affordable artificial light to work at night) and "holy days" more plentiful… but on that front, most pop reporting on that seems to forget that today we have two-day weekends, while medieval European communities often only rested on Sunday (and even Sunday-is-rest-day was relaxed somewhat to avoid crop spoilage).
The modern equivalent would be if everyone's job was to hit the gym for 10 hours a day in summer and 4 a day in winter, and still sometimes had mandatory overtime. Some people do labour-intensive work today, but pre-industrial this would be 90%+ of the population and not by choice.
What we actually have in developed nations today, is no significant labour before 18 or over 68, only about 70% the people of working age* are in work at any given time, and the "work" is far less intensive. Less than half of us are employed today to support the whole population. I say "are employed" rather than "work" because childcare and domestic work is still work, but this too is much easier than pre-industrial life.
* "working age" means different things in different surveys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_employmen...
A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you. 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
Industrialization increased working hours, not decreased them.
> A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you.
Way to misread what I wrote.
A subsidence farmer necessarily spends their lives doing as much work as they can eat food, because the energy to do the work is that food.
Their work cycle was arranged differently than ours, with harvest season being longer days because letting crops spoil in the fields meant starvation come winter, and winter hours being mostly limited by sunlight and moonlight because artificial illumination was far too expensive.
> 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
And? Those workers got those rights, past tense. The fact they got them is a big part of why less than half of the living population in OECD nations needs to work today: their efforts 200-100 years ago are why it is taxes paying for schools and pensions, not the largesse of lords limited to almshouses.
If we suddenly get an anti-aging treatment that has us all live 200 years*, all the governments can trivially handle this just by adjusting pension ages.
* somehow without any of the other things implied by the tech that can make such treatments; add those things in and you have to ask "why only 200?" and "what else can this tech do?" and this is all about AI having been a big contributor to some bio research, so there's a lot of "what else" already and we don't even have the anti-aging treatment yet.
This is a horribly wrong understanding of history. If you think life today is in any way comparable to the Industrial Revolution, you need to pick up a history book because your history classes failed you.
If you think malnourished subsidence farmers could work non-stop before industrialization then you need to think about that a bit more and aread a bit more early and pre-industrial works.