[subradios]

The industrial revolution moved 90% of workers out of farming, yes 90% of employment in 1870 was agricultural, literally producing calories.

We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.

Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.

[tarotuser]

Ned Ludd's premise was of the quality of autonomy and life of the workers that were being automated. As automation came in, workers got less money, treated worse, and had worse lives.

Being called a 'Luddite' was NEVER about technology, but whom gains from technology.

And I dare-say he was right in his concerns. The gains of technology are privatized by the owner class, even though we worker class are the ones who utilize them. One needs to look no further than the "gig economy".

[arcticbull]

They just wanted apprenticeships for operators and decent pay. [1]

Luddites were the victims of a very successful smear campaign.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

[soiler]

> quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway. [citation needed]

I'm not trying to stuff AI back into Pandora's box. It's here, and it's coming. It can be a really great thing, or it can be catastrophic. So I mostly agree with your last point. But it we're going to talk about learning from our mistakes, the industrial revolution gave us The Jungle, and Amazon, and the obliteration of The Amazon.

Things didn't work out for the best; many of them worked out horribly. And things that did work out did so because the road was paved with human bodies (and tens of billions of nonhuman bodies).

[thescriptkiddie]

The Luddites were not broadly opposed to new technology, they were opposed to the ownership structure which cut them out of the higher profits the new technology brought.

[unity1001]

> We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.

Nope. That 'moved workforce' started living in industrial slums and dying at a ripe old age of ~40 instead of living until their late 60s.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_histor...

[cornel_io]

And now the average worldwide lifespan is 72, higher if you look at countries that are fully industrialized.

Transitions suck for the people left behind, but that doesn't mean that progress is bad, it can really help people overall.

[tristor]

That link is unhinged. It considers people to be self-sufficient on mere subsistence. A society which creates collective incentives towards collaboration and away from violent domination, creating wealth and value in excess of subsistence, and opening up the massive quality of life increase to all, is a significant departure in a positive direction from mere subsistence for an agrarian peasant that survives at the whim of people who could brutally and violently take from them.

That has to be the most hilariously and sadly unhinged reading and retelling of history I have ever seen. A wonderful example of lying with truths. The author seems to be part of a communist online writer collective, I suppose that should be unsurprising given the subject matter. Commies are wild.

[wolverine876]

It didn't work out well for a great many of those workers or their children. The people who got rich would not accept an ROI two generations down the road. Are you willing to accept that now - lose your career, much of your income, so that the changes in society will benefit your grandchildren (while billionaires and their children cash in right now)?

'It works out in the long run' is BS, and is always applied to someone else.

[fnordpiglet]

I think the next level is post scarcity. In a post scarcity world maybe we don’t labor and toil to live because it’s unnecessary to tie home, health, food, and life necessities to labor if our labor isn’t useful. Maybe life becomes about something other than working to live and living to work. Maybe tying labor to life necessities was necessary given scarcity of labor, but when labor scales independently of people we need a new way of allocating resources.

[VLM]

Why do contemporary discussions of post scarcity always require something in the future rather than appearing in the past due to "the assembly line" or "agriculture"?

Surely in the vast universe of past human discovery it seems likely if post-scarcity were possible in any form, that we'd have already discovered what will initiate post-scarcity so it should be here now... and it seems unlikely that any individual invention in the future will kick it off if none of the past inventions did.

[thedorkknight]

Would be lovely if there was actually any movement to avert the employment apocalypse. So far all I see is talk, and I have no idea how to do anything beyond that myself