[simondotau]

Social progress is literally the story of labor saving devices. Creating more with less labor means a society of relative abundance, with more time for education, creativity, leisure and personal growth. Don't be fooled into thinking LLMs are any different to the tractor, the loom, the calculator, or shoe factories in the third world.

[dofm]

Don't be fooled into thinking that the tractor or the loom brought about positive social progress.

It wasn't the machines that caused the social progress. It was the organised labour movements (and the variously destructive or violent sabotage movements) pushing back against the machines that made the social progress.

The tractor and the loom made life noticeably worse for the people they replaced until they organised against them, and even then it took decades for them to get back the limited kind of quality of life (and health) an agricultural worker might have had.

I do find it interesting how many AI people make tractor and loom analogies without the slightest grasp of the true history of the industrial revolution.

Any social progress that comes from AI will not be something AI people can claim as their success, because it will have happened at their expense. There will be pushback; it may be violent.

[simondotau]

The suggestion that violence may be necessary does not strengthen your argument, it exposes its weakness. A movement that cannot defend its ideals without romanticising destructive force is not protecting social progress. It is to fundamentally misunderstand where social progress comes from, or what represents a good life.

As for the rest, it's a remarkably selective account of the industrial revolution. Your argument relies upon the unspoken inference that pre-industrial agricultural life was somehow a better life that was diminished by progress.

The tractor did not merely replace farm workers. It allowed a tiny fraction of the population to produce vastly more food while releasing millions of people from exhausting agricultural labour. Perhaps you would prefer a life of hard physical labour, low output, poor medicine, food insecurity, and little protection against injury, disease, or harvest failure. Perhaps you don't like that you toil away in an air-conditioned office writing video game code, for a salary that you wish was higher, because you dread the cost of your next smartphone purchase.

Technological change created enormous productivity gains. Yes, these often unfairly disadvantage workers trained in the outgoing industries. But I don't hear you arguing for a return to hand-weaving, because the societal benefit of progress is inarguable.

[dofm]

> The suggestion that violence may be necessary does not strengthen your argument, it exposes its weakness.

I am not at all suggesting it is necessary; you are projecting that onto me. I am merely observing that it might happen. Already is happening.

> Your argument relies upon the unspoken inference that pre-industrial agricultural life was somehow a better life that was diminished by progress.

Well for several generations life expectancy actually fell, working hours increased, general health worsened, child and infant mortality worsened. It took until the 1900s for those measures to improve. Child labour became an outsized evil until work and education reforms happened really only 140 years ago.

Do you not understand that industrial work was not less exhausting until workers rights movements did something about it? Not at all less dangerous? Not at all less dirty, less violent, better paid, more free, more secure?

For the first century or so, the industrial revolution (and the second agricultural revolution) made the average worker's life worse — less stable, less constant, fewer rights, a destruction of traditions and social cohesion.

The social progress you argue that technology drove, it drove as largely a negative influence. Did we get modern medicine after two hundred years or so? Of course. Was there industrial progress? Of course. But social progress happened as a result of the labour organisation of people to stop their lives being made radically worse by a class of new extremely rich capitalists. Productivity gains are not social progress, nor are they a proxy for it.

> Perhaps you don't like that you toil away in an air-conditioned office writing video game code, for a salary that you wish was higher, because you dread the cost of your next smartphone purchase.

This is childish straw man projection of which you should be a bit ashamed, IMO. That is the kindest thing I can say of it.

[simondotau]

Call it whatever you like. I'm perfectly fine with my use of obvious hyperbole, and I have no plans to reconsider when I'm unconvinced that the misreading of it was sincere.

Claiming that life expectancy "fell for several generations" is a poor reading of the data. Most generously there was a period of stagnation predominantly caused by a combination of scarlet fever and rapid urbanisation.

More generally you're arguing against positions I haven't espoused and which I don't think even represent areas of disagreement. Productivity gains and social organisation are not opposing forces. The surplus from higher output made shorter hours, better pay, public health, and medicine sustainable, making it possible for labour movements to secure larger shares and better terms of that surplus. We live in an amazing world now, if you take a moment to stop and think about what actually matters.

[watwut]

> Social progress is literally the story of labor saving devices.

Historically it was not. They are two mostly unrelated things. Creating more with less labor can mean the richest getting richer while middle class becomes poor and poor become hopelessly poor.

> Creating more with less labor means a society of relative abundance, with more time for education, creativity, leisure and personal growth.

It never meant that, this is fairly tale. We got 40 hours workweek rather then 80 hours workweek because of political movements and fights, not because of technology. Labor saving device, on itself, leads to two outcomes: you work as much as before, but produce more (cue all the burned out overworked ai coders) or you get unemployed desperately looking for new work.

[simondotau]

Political movements influenced how abundance was shared. They did not create that abundance.

Production and consumption are directly linked: societies can consume only what they produce. When individuals become more productive, society has more to consume. And indeed there is more. So much more. What you call a "fairy tale" is, thankfully, the world we live in.

When considering prosperity, it's important to emphasise what's real. So what if Warren Buffett owns a massive number of shares in notionally highly valued corporations? There are plenty of carrots available in the supermarket, and at an extraordinarily low prices by historical standards. Warren Buffett is not personally consuming some grotesquely disproportionate share of the carrots ... or pretty much any commodity which constitutes real material prosperity.

[watwut]

Political movements we are talking about were result of rapidly worsening living conditions for large groups of people. They did not necessary followed technological progress, technological progress was not necessary condition for their existence.

Nor were they result of a new abundance.

> When considering prosperity, it's important to emphasise what's real.

Yes. And what did actually happened in the past.

> So what if Warren Buffett owns a massive number of shares in notionally highly valued corporations?

Meanwhile, Warren Buffett : "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

The accumulation of power and money by smaller group of people means loss of power by the rest people. Those with power then use it to their own benefit while rest of us dont have that option. This result in the small group having even more power, while needs and wants of the rest of us are ignored. In turn, it means worsening conditions for the people on the loosing side.

And you see this process happening as we speak here. You see it at political decisions being made by the administration, at climate change approach, at unaccountability of the Epstein group of friends, at wars for oil, at decay of the democracy.

Materially you see K shaped economy, in us being unable to buy RAM and electronics, loosing rights, loosing control of devices to the corporations, basic necessities getting more expensive and so on.

[simondotau]

That is a pile of unrelated grievances pretending to be an economic argument. Once again, your fixation on politics obscures the central point: politics can redistribute production; it cannot redistribute what has not been produced.

The RAM example is particularly absurd. Two decades ago, ordinary consumers were not complaining about the price of 64 or 128 GB of RAM because owning that much was barely imaginable. You are complaining about access to a product that exists only because capitalism drove extraordinary technological progress. Obsessing over RAM shows a lack of historical perspective and a badly distorted idea of what constitutes a good life.

Yes, concentrated wealth means Warren Buffett has a disproportionately large share of influence. But that does not mean Warren Buffett also consumes a disproportionately large share of the resources that represent human flourishing. Ownership, political power, and physical consumption are different things. Corporate shares are not sandwiches ripped from the mouths of children.

And blaming every disliked event, from wars to Epstein to electronics prices, on conspiracies involving the ultra-wealthy is exactly the kind of unhinged, zero-sum populism that corrodes democracy. Instead of evidence and analysis, we're given a third rate morality play about a wicked elite stealing everything from "the people". Extreme polarisation and populist thinking are corrosive forces in modern society.