Yes peasant revolts happened before this. There was an old cruel aristocracy, and then a new, industrial aristocracy which was inexperienced, fumbling and cruel. Industrialization wasn't the first harsh transition in human history, but who argued it was?
Hans Rosling did a great job explaining all that progress.
Like, what's a few dead employees between friends?
> Many economists say there is no need to worry. They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
The cotton gin is an example of an automation removing the need for labor (deseeding cotton) and subsequently creating a greater need for labor elsewhere (planting and harvesting). Of course, in this example, the increased labor demand ultimately resulted in 720K deaths.
The Linotype was a win for printing workers. Typesetting had been bottlenecking the process, and with fast typesetting, book and newspaper prices came down, and the volume of printed material increased enormously. That's the good case.
The glass-bottle blowing machine is the not-so-good case. Bottle-blowing used to take a team of five people trained to work together and manipulate molten glass, blowpipe, and mold with tight coordination. This was a skilled trade and paid well, but bottles were expensive. Automatic bottle-making machines could make bottles rapidly with minimal labor. Bottle sales went up, and the bottle business grew, but the skilled trade was dead. Most of the workers were shoveling sand in one end or taking bottles out the other. This didn't take much skill. Operating the machines was not too hard. You probably needed a maintenance guy who really understood them, but only one for many machines. So most of the skilled jobs went away, replaced by low-paid entry level jobs.
The worst case was the stone planer. Back when brick was the key building material, stone lintels were used over doors and windows to provide structural support for the bricks above. Stone was chipped by hand by big guys with big hammers and big chisels to make flat, rectangular stone beams. The stone planer was a powered machine for squaring off a block of stone. Like a wood planer, but heavier-duty. No more need for big guys with chisels. Huge increase in productivity. But the market didn't grow, because stone lintels were a minor building component and cheaper stone lintels didn't mean more demand for them. So most of the workers lost their jobs.
Those three outcomes still apply to many cases of computerization.
This may be the best argument for basic income. Why don't we just admit that we just haven't a clue how things are going to pan out? Things could be fine, or things could get very nasty. Looked at this way basic income is not analogous to social welfare/security – when we admit that we have no clue how the future is going to unfold then basic income looks more like social insurance.
This puts me in mind of a thought I had this morning. Why are narratives compelling? Because they explain events. In the past before formal methods allowed us to develop accurate models humans used a narratives even where they are inappropriate. Now, because models have been so successful the pendulum has swung the other way and we tend to over-rely on model based explanations when really we have no clue.
What am I saying? Just suppose that the "elephant curve" has been brought about by automation or the 4th industrial wave as the article calls it. We have many many people predicting outcomes based on economic and social models that may fail to apply in spectacular fashion. Maybe what would be better would be to institute basic income to ride out digital automation while models are tested and refined. But also let us collect stories from now and from the recent past to use as cautionary tales whose main purpose is emphasize the point "we don't really have a clue and anybody who tells you they do is talking out of their ass".
I highly suspect people are much more interested in the first, but not really the second. Interests who stand to benefit from the second are selling them as a package deal and we will end up only getting the second. In other words, the arrest machine will keep running, but businesses will be free to fleece customers, government and employees with impunity.
Surprising though, regulation is intended to save capitalism, not hurt it, at least in the long term. If capitalism runs down a path where it no longer benefits the vast majority of citizens in any given country, there will be hell to pay resulting in the end of capitalism. That would be a shame too, properly regulated capitalism is a really great system.
Many of the emigrants of the 1800s ended up settling "new" land in the US. But there's vast territories around the world that are extremely inexpensive. Since the 1800s we have grown more dependent on the services provided by the state in urban areas.
Alaska is largely government owned. It's empty, but that doesn't mean that you can take a chunk of land there.
Although those places are not very conductive to farming...
Nowadays, you really can't.
Somehow I think the owning class will come up with ways to make this illegal or impossible.
That's what the poster above meant by "the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive", and owning these robots would be the massive amount of capital; you'd be able to sustain yourself because (and if) you'd have a lot of very expensive robots, not because you just had some land; and you'd also be able to sustain yourself by just investing the value of these robots.
So there WAS vast expanses available by that time, even without intentional genocide (which also happened).
A large percentage of the land battles of the War of 1812 were fought between the US and natives because the US wanted the land of the natives to become open space so the natives allied themselves with Britain.
Lewis and Clark would not have survived or even made it to the coast if they had not had help from most of the tribes they met along the way. Of course we displaced all of the natives they met eventually.
I just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me so that may bias my opinion.
2. There is still a huge amount of open space in America. In 1800, there were only 5 million citizens, compared to 323 million today.
3. Natives lived all over the continent. Europeans landed where the ocean ended.
The problem is is that a robot this advanced could also be used for very sophisticated bad purposes, so you're going to have lots of regulation and big corporations will only be able to use these robots and you'll have to buy things they produce with whatever meager wages they let you have.
When the prices crash a large number of people with robots will be unable to pay back the loan. Their robots will be repossessed. They will now be out of a job and with no robot.
The poor would get left over food from the kindness of people with robots? They'll certainly never work again.
I have an American friend who lives in Argentina who works online. The cost of living is such that he can work two months and pay his living expenses for two years. Those horribly low prices in Argentina are totally killing him. Not!
So what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?
This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving.
BTW, The novella "Manna" by Marshall Brain is kind of a good take on the future with robots and everything, though I don't really like his "happy" future.
BTW, thanks for giving me a hard time on this. I am getting to the point where this is going to be a bit of a manifesto and you're helping me flesh things out.
You're friend in Argentina:
* has the ability to get a job from home, which means it's probably a tech/outsourcing job in a first world country. That doesn't take care of 95% of the population. That doesn't fix the issues.
* In the robot scenario where robots are smart enough to understand markets/futures and can decide a completely different line of work, and then do that work, those remote jobs are gone. Your friend is out of work. He doesn't get a robot.
* the company that hires him has to compete for resources in their country of origin. Their local pay requirements determine what they think a "good deal" on labor is. That country would have robots as well and their wages would crater. Again your friend's cush life would disappear, unless he could buy a robot.
>what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?
Now you are getting to the root of the issue.
We produce enough food in the US that nobody should go hungry, yet we have swaths of kids that don't know where their next meal is coming from.
We have enough abandoned houses that nobody should be homeless, but people still live on the streets.
In capitalism, a private person/entity produces and someone else has to PAY to use what's produced. The issue isn't that there won't be enough to go around. The issue is that our current system will allow lots of people to starve and do without even when there is excess.
You used the term libertarian. That might be why you're getting all the push back. Maybe I'm misinformed on the topic. Libertarians believe an unregulated market and human morality will make everything better. Those two things combined gave us the triangle trade, raw goods (America) --> manufactured goods (Europe) --> slaves (Africe). We also got child labor, poisonous food being sold, no education, life threatening work conditions, etc.
>This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving
Being against this strategy is the antithesis of capitalism. If I give away food, prices drop. If I reduce the supply then prices will go up.
During the great depression, prices dropped so low that all farmers were going to go bankrupt. Farmers themselves were dumping crops and rioting to keep crops off the market to try and increase prices. Farmers were marching on courts because they were demanding that foreclosures stop.
If you let farmers flood the market with goods (lowering prices), while allowing them to refuse to pay their debts, then what kind of economy do you have? It's not capitalism.
My concern is that the coming wave of automation will recreate the great depression x10. The population at large doesn't see it coming, and maybe I'm a chicken little. 30% of the US population think poor people are just lazy, and that if they just worked harder they'd be better off.
When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.
This is what I keep harping on with folks. I think automation will hit and hit hard and our current economic/political structures are not ready for it or won't be able to adapt fast enough (hence your depressionx10 or just a massive inequality gap).
We already have 'more productive' economies but we have stagnant wage growth, increasing rental/housing costs due to people leaving for cities since there are little/no economic prospects in rural areas now, and, as you said, logistical problems in fulfilling basic necessities. Not to mention mental models that say that these 'unemployed' folks are bad and should just retrain/go to bootcamp/move elsewhere.
Consumption-wise, we can buy whatever we want. Shitty food is cheap, electronics, etc, all cheap. But some of the base foundations in Maslow's hierarchy don't come very cheap anymore and it's harder and harder to get to the higher reaches.
* My friend is not a rockstar programmer. He's about average, and in San Francisco he was living in Bayview and getting his house and his car regularly broken into and barely scraping by. Now he lives like he makes 5x the money he did in SF and his taxes are vastly lower since he's making less money, but living better. This is one of the largest mysteries of modern capitalism. Why are the prices for things so vastly different in different countries?
* If the robots can run the futures market and do general purpose programming then we probably won't even need money because we will have perfected central planning. Instead the robots will be playing a game called "The Humans" which is like when we play "The Sims" with the goal of trying to make the Humans happy. This will go on at a superhuman level of intellect and we won't even be able to analyze what the heck is going on, much like we can't really know why Alpha Go makes the moves it makes. We just won't turn it off because we can't live without it. This is the good or bad future depending on the ultimate fitness function, which in the good future is make everybody happy and not where the fitness future is based on deep ecology (DE) [1] which would prefer a 95% population reduction.
* My friend might not be a web developer, but he could probably get a job working on designing some guy's Burning Man float who owned a robot for enough to live well since it would require an absolutely trivial amount of effort to live since there would be so much supply.
* As far as Libertarianism goes, your formulation seems to be that that means no rules. No not really. I don't think ANY libertarian that is respected by the libertarian community would think slavery or poisoning people should be legal so you really have got a strawman there. Besides if we had no rules at all the wealthy Deep Ecology people could get together and decide they wanted to exterminate everybody they don't need to maintain things with killer robots who unlike in the movies have perfect aim and tactical strategy.
* The foreclosures during the great depression were due to collapse of bank reserves due to fractional reserve banking. You had short panics in the 19th century before the fed and fractional reserve banking, but not depression like scenarios of rapid credit contraction as the money multiplier work in reverse. This is unfortunately a very very deep rabbit hole side issue that requires a 30 page essay to get through. In China, which is probably more capitalist than the U.S, they have a different system. They have tons of companies that have bad debts and the government prints money out of thin air to selectively bail them out without austerity forced on the taxpayer, which is why they haven't had a credit crunch that has predicted every year for the last 30 years.
* The happy path of the future AI automation is normal people get access to these robots and use them to produce unlimited prosperity. The bloody path is only the elite get access and they decide to wipe out everyone else with killer robots because they find them to be irritating useless eaters.
Empires fell during this time in western europe. And we had a civil war in the US.
> Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties.
You forgot the mass extermination of natives in the US due primarily to industrialization. And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined.
The nations first to industrialize benefited immensely at the expense of others. But it was extremely bloody in the US as well.
>And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined.
Only because the causalities from both sides count as American casualties, and because we developed better medical treatment and sanitation technology.
Far more civil war soldiers died of disease than combat, which was mitigated in later wars through advanced technology. The number of US combat deaths was higher in WWII.
This is an oft-repeated genocide denial. Yes, disease killed many natives but that's not what committed genocide against the natives and stole their land. This is the same genocidal denial peddled by some who want to excuse nazis by claiming the jews died of disease in the holocaust.
> Only because the causalities from both sides count as American casualties, and because we developed better medical treatment and sanitation technology.
What's your point? Dead is dead. Should they not be counted?
> Far more civil war soldiers died of disease than combat
This is the case in most wars. Not just the civil war. Most of the deaths in ww2 were due to disease/starvation/etc rather than combat. Should we not count those?
The current consensus is that disease was the primary cause of depopulation. Perhaps you should read some of the current work in the field.
That doesn't change the fact that European colonists conquered and subjugated the remaining Native population.
>This is the same genocidal denial peddled by some who want to excuse nazis by claiming the jews died of disease in the holocaust.
Nonsense. You're going against the scholarly consensus here--just like holocaust deniers.
>This is the case in most wars. Not just the civil war. Most of the deaths in ww2 were due to disease/starvation/etc rather than combat. Should we not count those?
You held up the Civil War as an exemplar of terrible wars, saying that it was "bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined". The implication is that it was somehow worse than other wars.
The point is that this is a useless comparison to make and taken out of context you can draw conclusions that don't fit the facts. Previous wars were less bloody because they involved fewer combatants. Later wars were less bloody because we developed new sanitation techniques. And ww2 was much worse in terms of civilian casualties. You can't really draw conclusions about the time period or the social upheaval caused by the industrial revolution based on civil war casualty numbers.
As I said, that's just genocidal denier's distracting tactic. Also, the consensus is that most victims of the holocaust died of disease/starvation. That doesn't change the fact that the genocide took place. You keep harping on it as if the disease caused the genocide. It didn't. It was european colonization. If europeans didn't come to america and steal native lands, americas would be full of natives - disease or not.
> That doesn't change the fact that European colonists conquered and subjugated the remaining Native population.
And the genocide. Keep denying it all you want, it doesn't change reality.
> Nonsense. You're going against the scholarly consensus here--just like holocaust deniers.
The only one denying genocide is you.
> You held up the Civil War as an exemplar of terrible wars
No. I said it was the worse was america experienced. I didn't say it was an "exemplar of terrible wars".
> saying that it was "bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined".
Because it's true.
> The implication is that it was somehow worse than other wars.
Yes. It was the worst war america fought in. It was the bloodiest. It caused the most damage. It resulted in the most casualties in absolute terms and as a percentage of the US population. If you can find a war that was worse for america, please let me know.
> Previous wars were less bloody because they involved fewer combatants.
No kidding.
> You can't really draw conclusions about the time period or the social upheaval caused by the industrial revolution based on civil war casualty numbers.
Sure you can. Especially in terms of the civil war and its place in american political and military history.
Listen, you are a genocide denier. And now you are arguing against the civil war facts. I'm finished here. You are free to believe what you want.
European colonization brought disease, but disease spread west faster than settlers, or even explorers.
Disease is the cause of the Native American population decline. Without disease the settlers wouldn't have been able to push the remaining Native peoples off of their lands. In the vast majority of cases disease was a byproduct--the settlers didn't intend for hundreds of thousands of people thousands of miles from them to die.
There were many cases where Europeans intentionally killed Native Americans, in some cases intentionally spreading disease.
You seem to have a very difficult time with nuance. Yes European colonizers caused millions of deaths, but the vast majority were caused indirectly without the knowledge of the colonizers. Yes the Civil War caused the highest death toll in US history, but only because both sides were considered American (despite the fact that they weren't American during the war).
>Listen, you are a genocide denier.
Please try to be a little more civil. This is hacker news not reddit.
>And now you are arguing against the civil war facts. I'm finished here.
I never argued against any facts you presented. My argument is that these facts are useless without context.
> I'm finished here.
I doubt it. I'm fairly certain you're going to reply to this.
Industrialization is what prompted and allwed ships to bring millions of europeans to the US. It's what allowed railroads to ship millions to the midwest and the west. And of course the desire for oil/resources and farmland/etc. Industrialization is what allowed our armies to wipe out and clear the natives west of the mississippi.
interesting that it also correlated with emergence of national identities in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe). There is some parallel here to the nationalistic anti-globalization movements starting to rise today.
>They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
Which is then followed by this in the 4th paragraph:
>The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million.
Dafuq? What do they think marxism was a reaction to?
Have they never heard of the theory of alienation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
To avoid the HN snark police (oops), here is a relevant passage:
> They are definitely right about the long period of painful adjustment! The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million. The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
The thesis seems to be that we should consult historians, not just economists, on this subject.
But it's details in general I agree that Economists are the least interesting people to ask.
Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. Average height of Englishman decreased before started to increase (based on military records). Workers started to organize, skulls were cracked. People were shot in the streets. Armies were ordered to kill workers. There were bloody civil wars and revolutions.
Industrial revolution was not possible without massive social change that created, land reforms, working class, middle class and increased private consumption and accumulation of capital. It was at times bloody, but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Not so in Soviet Union or China.
Anti-Union violence, Union violence (union busting) communist violence, anticommunist violence was pretty intense at time even when the society as whole worked.
Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. We can still list numerous conflicts with 10-100 deaths: The Molly Maguire trials (20 workers executed), Battle of Virden, 1898 Colorado labor war,Italian Hall disaster, Ludlow massacre, Thibodaux Massacre, Pullman Strike, West Virginia Coal Wars, Rock Springs massacre, 1905 Chicago Teamsters' strike, Steel Strike of 1919, The Herrin Massacre, 1922, Battle of Blair Mountain, Hanapēpē massacre, Harlan County War, Memorial Day massacre of 1937.
Future of Automation will create wealth and prosperity beyond all our dreams, but it requires massive political struggle that settles issues like privacy, rent seeking, ownership of personal information.
Violence in the street may be positive sign that automation is finally changing our society.