[subradios]

The industrial revolution moved 90% of workers out of farming, yes 90% of employment in 1870 was agricultural, literally producing calories.

We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.

Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.

[tarotuser]

Ned Ludd's premise was of the quality of autonomy and life of the workers that were being automated. As automation came in, workers got less money, treated worse, and had worse lives.

Being called a 'Luddite' was NEVER about technology, but whom gains from technology.

And I dare-say he was right in his concerns. The gains of technology are privatized by the owner class, even though we worker class are the ones who utilize them. One needs to look no further than the "gig economy".

[arcticbull]

They just wanted apprenticeships for operators and decent pay. [1]

Luddites were the victims of a very successful smear campaign.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

[soiler]

> quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway. [citation needed]

I'm not trying to stuff AI back into Pandora's box. It's here, and it's coming. It can be a really great thing, or it can be catastrophic. So I mostly agree with your last point. But it we're going to talk about learning from our mistakes, the industrial revolution gave us The Jungle, and Amazon, and the obliteration of The Amazon.

Things didn't work out for the best; many of them worked out horribly. And things that did work out did so because the road was paved with human bodies (and tens of billions of nonhuman bodies).

[thescriptkiddie]

The Luddites were not broadly opposed to new technology, they were opposed to the ownership structure which cut them out of the higher profits the new technology brought.

[unity1001]

> We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.

Nope. That 'moved workforce' started living in industrial slums and dying at a ripe old age of ~40 instead of living until their late 60s.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_histor...

[cornel_io]

And now the average worldwide lifespan is 72, higher if you look at countries that are fully industrialized.

Transitions suck for the people left behind, but that doesn't mean that progress is bad, it can really help people overall.

[unity1001]

> And now the average worldwide lifespan is 72

Technology and science changed the living standards. Not capitalism or industrial revolution by themselves. In fact, average age for adults was already within 60-70 range before the industrial revolution - what brought down the averages was children dying early. Medicine during scientific revolution solved that. In that period, every bit of knowledge was being shared openly by everyone, entire science and technology was open source.

In fact Capitalist mode of economics has changed that. It pushed patents, and it started to monopolize and control science and technology starting from the latter part of the 19th century. That is also why the pace of scientific progress slows down around that time.

[cornel_io]

It doesn't much matter because capitalism is here to stay, and people like it.

[tristor]

That link is unhinged. It considers people to be self-sufficient on mere subsistence. A society which creates collective incentives towards collaboration and away from violent domination, creating wealth and value in excess of subsistence, and opening up the massive quality of life increase to all, is a significant departure in a positive direction from mere subsistence for an agrarian peasant that survives at the whim of people who could brutally and violently take from them.

That has to be the most hilariously and sadly unhinged reading and retelling of history I have ever seen. A wonderful example of lying with truths. The author seems to be part of a communist online writer collective, I suppose that should be unsurprising given the subject matter. Commies are wild.

[ClumsyPilot]

> collaboration and away from violent domination

Working in an iron foundry or steelworks is more peacefull than quetly living on a farm? There is less conflict between workers than farmers?

What is the basis for this fantasy?

[tristor]

Human history is full of violence, and not all of it is between "betters" and "lessers", it's just people being violent towards one another to get what they want. Post-industrial society established social order and rule of law much more clearly than anything prior. A big piece of this was due to compulsory and inclusive education, but many other factors including the rise of enterprises which required social interactions to reach personal success changed society to a structure where collaboration was rewarded much more so than violence, which was punished.

This was not the case prior to industrialization. You have some idyllic pastoral fantasy in mind, which was not true.

[ClumsyPilot]

> enterprises required social interactions to reach personal success changed society to a structure where collaboration was rewarded much more so than violence, which was punished.

One big hole in your argument - mexican cartels. Modern industrial society, loads of collaboration inside the cartel, very violent people achieve massive success. I am confident that life of a medieval farmer was far less violent that living with a violent cartel.

Can you actually bring any empirical evidence that victorian-age factory life was more peaceful than agrarian life 100 years prior? I think you are engaging in self-delusion, or comparing today to 500 years ago - which is unfair

[unity1001]

> very violent people achieve massive success

Indeed. Also missing from the picture is the violence inherent in the system - the majority shareholders, ceos and execs of healthcare corporations that deny people treatment if they cant pay are inflicting much more violence than the tyrants of the past - its systemic, all-encompassing without any discrimination as to its target. But because the violent part is outsourced to the state's police to kick out and keep out those who cant pay, its magically 'not violent'. Whereas its possibly the worst systemic violence that ever invented in human history.

[unity1001]

> A society which creates collective incentives towards collaboration

There is no 'collaboration' in industrial slums. Its machinized slavery.

> Commies are wild.

From the other perspective, your knee-jerk dismissal of the widely known and discussed 'tragedy of the commons' sounds like a religious fundamentalism. Especially to non-Americans.

The people of the age openly described what was happening, criticized it and lamented what they lost. The perpetrators of the act had no qualms in openly declaring their intentions and doing what they declared, because they openly and actually proudly thought that was the way it should be.

The social awareness that we have today was not present in those ages - back then peasants had to 'know their place' and 'their betters' had all the right to do whatever they pleased with what they owned. So they had no problem in openly declaring things that we would find as sociopathic today.

If what you read in that small bit of article shocks and surprises you, wait until you read the actual memoirs of the aristocrats and industrialists from that age...

[nerdponx]

I don't think you're reading the article as-written.

It'd be nice to see some sources for the quoted pamphlets, but if we assume that they are actual quotes from primary source material, it's quite telling.

The article does get a lot wrong, e.g. conflating feudalism with modern industrialized capitalism (hunting was been controlled by central political authorities for centuries before the industrial revolution).

But there's also a good point being made, that breaking up communal economic systems can be used as a tool of subjugation and control. There's nothing in here about self-sufficiency or subsistence per se.

[notahacker]

tbh he's not wrong that the article says more about the partisan slant of the authors than it does about British industrial history. The article touches upon self sufficiency with the argument that that peasants could have made their own shoes from their own leather in a matter of hours so buying them proved they were poorer (a particular load of er... old cobblers) and I'm not sure various quotes about peasants being lazy proves anything more than the fact snobbery existed.

There's plenty of actually problematic stuff (the Enclosure Act) that happened to the British peasantry mostly before the Industrial Revolution without taking the view that peasantry was a particularly pleasant lifestyle that nobody would volunteer to change.

[unity1001]

> (the Enclosure Act) that happened to the British peasantry mostly before the Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution was already starting at that point. We associate the industrial revolution with machinization, but it was in fact translation of old feudal modes of land ownership to the entire economy. This trend started with the wool trade and the feudal lords finding wool trade more profitable than feudal land ownership. Coupled with the new modes of economic organization created during the Age of Exploration (corporations, stocks), this removed the incentive for the feudal aristocracy to maintain farming as a means of income and pushed them to maximize their revenue by moving to various emerging trades, with wool trade being the first. The pushing out of the peasants from the commons started around that time. What extra happened during the period that is directly labeled as the Industrial Revolution is just using the same method to push the peasantry into factories.

[nerdponx]

I think it's completely legitimate to ask, who benefits from denigrating peasants?

There is historical precedent for social biases being developed in order to justify economic and political institutions. It's often said for example that this is where modern racism comes from, a moral workaround for the obvious immorality of the Atlantic slave trade.

Thus, the presence of some kind of social or cultural bias might be a useful indicator of the presence of a developing or existing socioeconomic/political power dynamic.

I think self-sufficiency is a red herring here. Maybe the author was taken in by some kind of Marxist pre-industrial pastoral fantasy, but that doesn't mean they didn't make some good points along the way.

[unity1001]

> conflating feudalism with modern industrialized capitalism

They are precisely the same - the ownership structures of modern capitalism already existed in the form of ownership of non-land resources (roads, mines, water passages, even buying/selling rights of specific commodities) in the middle ages and then with the invention of corporations at the start of the age of exploration, they were fully fleshed out as the things we know today. From shareholders to stock market, from rights to own and use anything to transferrable concepts.

Industrial revolution has been merely the machinization of the already existing structure.

[wolverine876]

It didn't work out well for a great many of those workers or their children. The people who got rich would not accept an ROI two generations down the road. Are you willing to accept that now - lose your career, much of your income, so that the changes in society will benefit your grandchildren (while billionaires and their children cash in right now)?

'It works out in the long run' is BS, and is always applied to someone else.

[fnordpiglet]

I think the next level is post scarcity. In a post scarcity world maybe we don’t labor and toil to live because it’s unnecessary to tie home, health, food, and life necessities to labor if our labor isn’t useful. Maybe life becomes about something other than working to live and living to work. Maybe tying labor to life necessities was necessary given scarcity of labor, but when labor scales independently of people we need a new way of allocating resources.

[VLM]

Why do contemporary discussions of post scarcity always require something in the future rather than appearing in the past due to "the assembly line" or "agriculture"?

Surely in the vast universe of past human discovery it seems likely if post-scarcity were possible in any form, that we'd have already discovered what will initiate post-scarcity so it should be here now... and it seems unlikely that any individual invention in the future will kick it off if none of the past inventions did.

[fnordpiglet]

Because productivity still scaled linearly with consuming humans, even if the constants improved. AI and other advances offer a potential for nearly autonomous productivity allow for productivity that scales independently of available labor.

Additionally I would say that each advance brought us closer to post scarcity. We have close to eliminated extreme poverty globally. Compared to hunter gatherer society’s we already live post scarcity.

Finally we may very well be post scarcity, but the notion of nobility in work and morality of labor means we can’t yet seriously consider decoupling work from life necessities. At some point there won’t be enough bullshit jobs left to justify pretending people need to labor to eat, and society will either collapse or we will move beyond work to live.

I would posit however the invention left undone is the one we use humans for now. Their ability to reason, make independent decisions, synthesize new ideas in any situation, learn new and different skills, interacting with a complex field of visual, auditory, and sensory stimulus effectively towards a goal, etc. That’s why we research AI. If our tools have that, then our tools don’t need us. If our tools don’t need us, we don’t have to do the work. If we don’t have to do the work, there is no scarcity because work scales independent of us.

There are also other inventions we know of but haven’t perfected that help here. Efficient fusion is one. With that energy is cheap and plentiful and presumably clean. Energy is the ability to do work. With artificial minds that can produce minds that can in turn produce minds, fueled with plentiful energy, what’s left?

So I disagree that we’ve invented everything that might be useful, or that what hasn’t yet been invented won’t lead to improved productivity to the point that human labor is redundant and all human needs can be met without it.

[thedorkknight]

Would be lovely if there was actually any movement to avert the employment apocalypse. So far all I see is talk, and I have no idea how to do anything beyond that myself