[tw04]

> It’s not realistic to expect 8 hours of hard work out of a knowledge worker.

It wasn’t really realistic to expect hard physical labor for 70 hours a week, and yet in the 1800s before unions were established to negotiate workers rights, that’s exactly what we had.

What on earth makes you think non unionized IT workers aren’t going to be pushed to their breaking point and then pushed further? If AI truly starts eating all the knowledge work, there will be an endless supply of people lining up to work themselves to death.

[zombot]

> It wasn’t really realistic to expect hard physical labor for 70 hours a week

That makes no sense at all. If it was common, it was obviously realistic.

[port11]

People were, in a very literal sense, working themselves to death. The birth of the industrial age is documented as one of the worst periods in Humanity’s record for quality of life.

[disgruntledphd2]

To be fair, the industrial revolution also produced more books and other records, so there's a bias there in that without the changes to technology, there might not be as many books written about that period remaining.