[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.