[dofm]

Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.

The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour.

It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap.

Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job?

Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.

[gruez]

>In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.

source?

[dofm]

Literally any history of the industrial revolution in Britain (and I imagine the USA)

Farmers went from working outside at a stable work pace (and in many cases farming a small patch of their own land as part payment, so eating at least functionally well) to being forced out of their farming work by the second agricultural revolution (leading to the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs etc.) and to living in cramped industrial slums, working in appallingly dangerous and polluted factories, long hours, terrible food, toxic chemicals, severe health issues.

Subsequent infant mortality in industrial area families was about twice the rate in industrial areas as it was in rural areas because of appalling living conditions and poor food.

It's the underpinning story of the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.

An interesting link here:

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/vict...

But this is well-studied history. The industrial revolution did not liberate the poor until labour law changed to stop them being expendable; living standards took the best part of a hundred years, until as late as the early 1900s, to return to a level where people were as healthy as they were or to live as long.

[monocasa]

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

[gruez]

AFAIK that was massively flawed because it doesn't account for time spent doing various household chores or maintenance tasks. If you spent 4 hours making a shirt, that wouldn't count towards "hours worked", but if you worked a 2 hour job to buy a shirt it would.

[monocasa]

Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender. The etymology of "woman" is literally "weaving person", and those kinds of tasks were up to the mostly adult women who also wouldn't have been working in the fields, so it ends up being a wash when painting with a wide brush.

[gruez]

> The etymology of "woman" is literally "weaving person"

[citation needed]

>Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender.

It's still work. It doesn't magically have zero value because it was done by women. The methodology cited by the book counts only counts hours worked if it's farming or wage employment, but doesn't count any household labor, which means anything that's shifted from being made at home to being bought would could as extra hours worked, even if it saves time overall.

[watwut]

Women were working fields and were working with farm animals too. They did not done work that required physical strength unless they had no choice, but that does not mean they did not "worked fields".

Second, work being split by gender does not matter here. Women are, by definition, people too. And weaving, sewing, candles crafting were all literal necessity. A weaving woman would sell or exchange results of her work if she had an excess of it. They were not bored SAHM hobbies they way they would be now. This was economic activity just like any other.

[dofm]

I mean, you only have to look at actual available salary and hours data to see that factory workers worked at least as long a day and longer than a farm day can even be, and in conditions that were unambiguously worse.

But even if this were not true it’s still not a working analogy for AI, which is going to eliminate employment, not just job roles. It’s the whole pitch for AGI.

[gruez]

>I mean, you only have to look at actual available salary and hours data to see that factory workers worked at least as long a day and longer than a farm day can even be, and in conditions that were unambiguously worse.

1. Where's the hours data you're citing?

2. My whole point in the previous comment is that there's more to being a medieval peasant than just plowing the fields. If during the industrial revolution you spent more time in wage employment, but then spent less time on household tasks, that would be captured in the hours data as simply more hours worked, because the latter isn't accounted for in the hours data at all.