Item — HN Reader

Highly recommend people learn the history of the Industrial Revolution. I recently discovered the Industrial Revolutions Podcast[1] and have been enjoying it. What's happening today isn't unprecedented. The pace of change that's happening IS similar to periods of the industrial revolution.

For example, the flying jenny, overnight, basically put an entire craft industry of weaving into question. Probably more dramatically than anything Claude Code ever did.

It took A LOT and several world wars for brief periods of normalcy post WW2 - probably the exception, not the rule.

1 - https://industrialrevolutionspod.com/

4 comments

At the start I think everyone thought the industrial revolution could be a useful historical reference.

But what AI is selling is the obliteration of human knowledge work.

It just isn’t informative for that.

This is the key point. It threatens nearly everything in the limit, not one particular industry. There will be no "leveling up" into higher-order jobs, because the machines will be better at those too.

They thought that too in the industrial revolution. You can look back and see the jobs that came out of it. But at the time, it wasn't obvious to the people effected that there would be jobs again.

We may have hindsight bias in evaluating something that happened, but to the people that it happened to it was terrifying.

MIT's motto is mens et manus: mind and hand. These are, basically, the two primary attributes of human labor. They're the reason almost anyone gets hired to do anything. Our brains and our opposable thumbs are what set us ahead of the animal kingdom.

The industrial revolution first attempted to replace our hands. But the labor that was displaced had places to go: into smaller-scale manual work, where mass-production machinery was too expensive, and into knowledge work.

Now the AI is coming for knowledge work, and robots are getting better at small-scale work. We're not at that point yet, but looking down the road I'm not sure there will really be anything competitive left flesh-and-blood humans can offer to an employer.

The only exceptions I can think of are, maybe, athletics, live music performances, and escort services. But with only a few wealthy people as customers, I don't think there will be many job opportunities even in those fields. And I'm not sure that robots won't come for those too.

Why do you need a job in the scenario where machines have replaced all human labor?

You're forgetting that work is a means, not an end, for humanity.

You don't need a job, if you can maintain purchasing power without selling your labor. I didn't forget that, I just didn't take such an outcome for granted.

In other comments I have expressed support for UBI, as well as for paying parents to stay home and spend time with their children. I think the more automated our society gets, the less people should need to work to earn a living. But I look around and I just don't see anyone implementing such policies.

> But I look around and I just don't see anyone implementing such policies.

Because we have low unemployment. As long as we have jobs for people, you shouldn't expect UBI.

Again, this betrays a strong hindsight bias.

Nobody had any idea what was coming with the industrial revolution. There wasn't obviously other work for people. And for long periods of time nobody had an answer to that question for large percentage of the population.

In hindsight, we know the answers NOW, but then they did not know what was going to happen. We also don't know what's going to happen, it could go as you hypothesize. Or the Jevon's paradox people might be right and there's way more work to do.

The uncertainty is the historical lesson, not that "it'll all work out"

Your comment betrays a lazy survivorship bias.

I guess the people in Wall-E didn't really seem unhappy so perhaps you're right. My gut instinct though, is that there is a qualitative difference in the level of abundance and concentration of wealth, power, and influence we have today that needs to be taken seriously on its merits and not hand-waved away with tenuous historical analogies.

Yes, two hundred years ago, many people thought reading was a dangerous distraction for young people, just as film, radio, TV and the internet became later. But there is a qualitative difference to having social media in your pocket with vibrating notifications. Pretending its just more of the same honestly feels like slightly willful blindness at this point.

A guild craftsmen weaving / making firearms pre Industrial Revolution would see their work as much about “knowledge” as manual labor.

Much of that got obliterated by automation.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes

Nah, it's obliterating the distinction -- made by middle class folks and only temporarily true -- between physical labour and intellectual labour.

You as a blue collar machine operator, shoving punch cards in and getting answers out, is precisely what your boss always saw you as, or wanted you to be.

Our necessity as pseudo-craftsmen holding an intellectual high ground and wizardly/magical skills was always resented by investors, owners, and sometimes customers.

Blacksmithing and leather tanning and shoe making and seamstressing and furniture making was human knowledge work, too.

The Alvin Toffler stuff was always bullshit, but it's even more bullshit now.

The jobless French artisans who couldn't compete with English industrial imports was one of the causes of the French Revolution.

Thomas Picketty does indeed argue in Capital in the 21st Century that the post World War 2 period is indeed an exception in terms of inequality being lower while historically it is not, and it is reverting back to the mean of there being more inequality these days, yet people bemoan the idea of not being able to live off a single job when in reality that was never guaranteed.

Still, that's no reason to accept a return to that state of affairs. Progress happens slowly and imperceptibly, but on a grand scale it does happen.

Much as we'd like that to be true ideally, does it happen (in terms of inequality reducing)? I see no evidence of that, it ebbs and flows in various time periods and civilizations. One can try to resist that reversion to the mean but they'd historically be proven wrong.

For a start by not tearing down the systems that kept inequality in check in the past. Like union membership or banking regulation etc. just to name some examples.

The tearing down of those institutions IS the ebb.

That's like accepting burnt coffee is the average, so why try to make a good tasting cup. Nonsense.

The circumstances are similar, but the people are different. Look outside: this is WALL-E.