>In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.
source?
source?
Farmers went from working outside at a stable work pace (and in many cases farming a small patch of their own land as part payment, so eating at least functionally well) to being forced out of their farming work by the second agricultural revolution (leading to the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs etc.) and to living in cramped industrial slums, working in appallingly dangerous and polluted factories, long hours, terrible food, toxic chemicals, severe health issues.
Subsequent infant mortality in industrial area families was about twice the rate in industrial areas as it was in rural areas because of appalling living conditions and poor food.
It's the underpinning story of the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.
An interesting link here:
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/vict...
But this is well-studied history. The industrial revolution did not liberate the poor until labour law changed to stop them being expendable; living standards took the best part of a hundred years, until as late as the early 1900s, to return to a level where people were as healthy as they were or to live as long.
But even if this were not true it’s still not a working analogy for AI, which is going to eliminate employment, not just job roles. It’s the whole pitch for AGI.
1. Where's the hours data you're citing?
2. My whole point in the previous comment is that there's more to being a medieval peasant than just plowing the fields. If during the industrial revolution you spent more time in wage employment, but then spent less time on household tasks, that would be captured in the hours data as simply more hours worked, because the latter isn't accounted for in the hours data at all.
Second, work being split by gender does not matter here. Women are, by definition, people too. And weaving, sewing, candles crafting were all literal necessity. A weaving woman would sell or exchange results of her work if she had an excess of it. They were not bored SAHM hobbies they way they would be now. This was economic activity just like any other.
We have records of both.
And we don't have nearly the same amount of detail in women's work. That's why even today it's referred to as invisible labor.
[citation needed]
>Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender.
It's still work. It doesn't magically have zero value because it was done by women. The methodology cited by the book counts only counts hours worked if it's farming or wage employment, but doesn't count any household labor, which means anything that's shifted from being made at home to being bought would could as extra hours worked, even if it saves time overall.
Nobody said it had zero value. The point is that labor roles were extremely gender striated, and the record is mostly kept only for men's labor. So saying that they worked more because of the example task you gave doesn't make sense when societally that work was put onto others.