Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution. It took over 100 years of collective struggle through the labor movement, as well as technological advances, before labor conditions improved to be something along the lines of what they were in the preindustrial period (at least going by hours worked/year). If you're arguing that AI is going to be similar to this, I do not want to be a wage worker in the period where this takes place, just like I would not have liked to be a wage worker during the Industrial Revolution.

View on HN

No, it wasn't. And it wasn't because of government regulation. The land you require for preindustrial peasanting was, of course, tightly regulated and owned by ... well, not you. Read the whole "tragedy of the commons", especially the part about government deciding to just sell the whole thing to the highest bidder, which instead of fixing the problem, set off another wave of city migration.

If you stayed on the land you had to work, not quite like a slave, but close. And if you disagreed with this, the government had an army that convinced you ...

Factories offered a better alternative than that, and yes, mostly because the agricultural option was just not open, and just not worth it. They also offered a great density of people that made the labor movement possible in the first place.

Preindustrial peasantry wasn't like slavery. The feudal obligation days ranged from 8-12 hours of work depending on the time of year (obviously more in peak work times like harvest), of which 2-3 hours were spent on breaks and eating. The lords had to provide food and drinks for the peasants, and the peasants would work at their own paces like if they were on their own property. There's medieval writing from lords complaining about how they felt like the peasants were getting the better of them in this arrangement, enough that they sometimes preferred to hire laborers for money who they could work harder and not have to feed.

Most of the writing comparing factory work to agricultural work is from after the enclosure movement forced large portions of the agricultural working class to take the "wage work" arrangement with a similarly brutal schedule and work pace to factory work. You're right that the technological and agricultural advances that led to enclosure created a source of poor workers willing to accept factory work.

Obviously the peasants weren't spending the rest of the time sitting around, they had to work on their own land to keep themselves fed and clothed. It definitely wasn't some sort of lazy paradise, subsistence farming is a brutal and unstable way of life, I'm just arguing that the early Industrial period was even worse. If you want an "objective" measure of quality of life across vastly different time periods, the height of the average European went down a few inches during the Industrial Revolution due to malnutrition and overwork, and only recovered to its preindustrial average in the first half of the 20th century.

Pretty much all historians writing about industrial revolution are claiming completely opposite of what you do. Industrial revolution was a catastrophe for an average worker. The child mortality went up during industrial revolution. Social problems went up. It took quite a lot of violence for things to settle.

No they aren't. There very much was a reason during the industrial revolution why people were driven to the cities and into the factories.

The reason was agricultural labor was automated, it had nothing to do with the preferences of the people at the time. If people preferred farming to factory work, tough luck.

See ndiddy's comment about the "enclosure movement".

I think you both are walking around the point and not seeing it? It was about how much control the gov./authority can exert all along. During the feudal era, they had sword soldiers but the reach of these was limited because a peasant can fight and make a sword. It is much harder to make a tank or a gun (though drones might change that?), so after the industrial revolution a central auth. can have much control over the individual.

Now with the tech era, you can snoop into people businesses and control in a "softer" way. With AI, you might be able to bypass the knowledge workers who enjoyed a pleasurably life in the last 30 years or so. This is mostly because knowledge workers will sabotage your operation if not treated well.

Now this might not longer be the case as you'd no longer need them. The revolution can't happen if the people have no leverage: 1. either be able to defend against a professional army or 2. are an input in your supply chain and can stop your operations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com