[customguy]

This is the opposite of a loom. With a loom you can very easily see that what it makes is exactly like cloth made by hand, except it's more uniform and faster. There also wasn't this weird drive to drive out the heretics so the AI messiah may dwell among us, this desire to put all eggs in one basket, instead of welcoming competition and a control group.

[KaiserPro]

I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.

The powered loom produced more uniform, much cheaper fabric. It wasn't colourful or particularly flamboyant. It took a lot more work to get patterns (its where punch card come from)

But thats not the point. Powered looms meant that cottage industry that employed people close to sources of production (ie cotton/calico in india and wool in england) were thrown out on their arses. The majority lived on rented land/housing. Couldn't pay the rent and were kicked out into the loving arms of the poor laws. Lots of people had to re-train, the rest went begging. Combine that with agricultural reform, meant that Lots of people moved into slums in the towns, where they worked much longer, unsafer hours.

The rest dispersed into the wider world.

[customguy]

> I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.

Sure, I was in that comment. What you said is true, too, and given how much of this is driven by greed and not need, I would even say it's more important.

But the effect on the product matters, too, of course. Not just quality and bloat wise, but in a way it's like saying we no longer need to know how to read and write, we all get a butler and just ask them what a text says, or to write letters for us. Because the butler is smarter than any human, and it's so convenient. I'm ironically "with the Catholic Church" (not really, but you know) on this one because I see people/companies who want to be like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, and even without those, how sheer laziness can plunge us into some idiocratic abyss.

[merrua]

The industrial loom didn't make cloth the same as made by hand. All machine made cloth is worst than the best weavers could make. The cloth was just okay, and could be made faster and at scale and then sold. Now you can't buy cloth to the standard it used to be made.