People seem to forget history and the fact that statements like this have pretty much always been wrong. There’s always something that supposed to replace something else and throw people out of work. Plus, robots are cute.
Quality of life across Europe plummeted? Factories weren't manned by force except that which drove people to avoid starvation in the face of a pitiful agrarian lifestyle.
As T. S. Ashton pointed out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Ashton) in 1948, the industrial revolution meant the difference between the grinding poverty that had characterized most of human history and the affluence of the modern industrialized nations. No economist today seriously disputes the fact that the industrial revolution began the transformation that has led to extraordinarily high (compared with the rest of human history) living standards for ordinary people throughout the market industrial economies.
You are saying the industrial revolution == repetitive factory work under horrible conditions?
The parent comment was talking about artisans losing work, not farmers.
I think technological progress and innovation increased overall quality of life, while many specific things, such as jobs many workers felt they had no choice but to take in the shifting economic reality, were horrible for the people involved.
Saying that most of human history was grinding poverty is again, cherry picking. In terms of personal freedom and free time, as one of the most fundamental measures of value, humans had it way better at many points in history and much of prehistory.
It took almost a hundred years, and a lot of bloodshed for quality of life to return to where it was prior to the industrial revolution. I'm not particularly keen on seeing that happen in my life.
"It took almost a hundred years, and a lot of bloodshed for quality of life to return to where it was prior to the industrial revolution. "
Sorry, that is simply not true.
According to one study, real wages almost doubled in England between 1780 and 1850. An attempted rebuttal claimed that they "only" went up 30%.
Like many people, you seem to have an overly-rosy idea of what life is actually like as a subsistence-level, stoop-labor, agricultural peasant. Workers flocked to the new factories because those jobs were an improvement over what they had before (the exact same process is going on in China as we speak).
Were those jobs pretty nasty and horrible by modern standards? Of course they were. But not by the standards of the time.
This seems like a difficult moral argument to develop precisely. At what point in history do you prevent the current suffering, even if it would have resulted in a huge subsequent increase in quality of life?
In Milwaukee these days, around 50% of working-age black men can get work. 50 years ago it was 85%.
The market found more things for knowledge workers to do. Visit the rust belt sometime - the factory laborers were left behind a generation ago, we just choose not to think about it because they're in a different caste.
Agreed. The difference this time around is that basic needs are no longer scarce in areas advanced enought to decide what robots are doing. It's just a coincidence, but people conflate them
First world economies been in (or close to) a post-scarcity economy for probably the last fifty years.
The luddite fallacy misses the point. Nobody cares about employment rates if the job quality is shrinking. The luddite fallacy is still correct if everyone has to work two minimum wage jobs just to get by.
