Come on. This is dishonesty and isn't the reality. We may agree that the Industrial Revolution may have taken decades (certainly not 80 years) for its benefits to be *clearly and widely* felt by workers, but anything further is an abusive claim. So what, because the progress doesn't benefit to workers instantly, we shouldn't do it ?
In the end, whatever your position, industrialization eventually raised living standards. So what's wrong with that ?
> The continued impact of automation at least contributed to the rise of right wing extremism and an erosion of democracy all over the west
This is oversimplifying and correlation at the best, not causation
From half way through this (meandering) blog post:
https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
As for the populism link, that is well established empirically:
https://academic.oup.com/oxrep/article-abstract/34/3/418/504...
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12485/we-were-the-robots...
Etc...
Edit: Just found this when looking up sources, I haven't had time to look at it but just dumping it here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
As was highlighted in previous discussions, the industrial revolution took 80 years to start benefiting workers. The continued impact of automation at least contributed to the rise of right wing extremism and an erosion of democracy all over the west. Now we face a development that has the potential to be faster than those that came before, in the context of political systems more fragile and worse equipped to manage the change.
So yeah, disrupting the status quo can absolutely be dangerous. It has been dangerous (and deadly) in the past and in the present.