The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.
I can accept the premise that condiitions have improved, but not that it was consistent. It seems to me that it was anything but; more like extremely spiky. great depression, postwar economic miracle. Massive labor movements rose and fell, general strikes... Plus most countries have had several wars + revolutions in the last 200 years, including two world wars. Not all of those are to do with technology, but I also dont think technology wasnt indirectly responsible for the conditions that created some of them
Such a good comment, I would also add how much our perception of technology lifting conditions is conflated with the increased ability of governments to steer the economy to smooth things over.
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years
Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.
The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this.
You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.
I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions.
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years
They've improved, but not consistently on human timescales.
Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous. Things have, so far, trended better over time but they can be bad for whole generations and also past results do not guarantee future result
> The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity.
I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
> I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors".
We can and we will.
If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think.
> And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.
This seems obviously wrong as there are many counter examples. Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off. Mining mechanization made mines far less deadly and greatly reduced the human exertion required. I'd much rather harvest corn in an air conditioned combine vs. with an ox.
Even during the early industrial revolution, notorious for poor working conditions, people overlook why there was such high demand for those shitty jobs. The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside. A family's survival was dependent on a good harvest.
During the early industrial revolution people were not starving in the countryside because of poor harvests. They were starving in the countryside because the UK at that time siezed land that was previously held in common and granted it to the nobility through the enclosure acts. Now to survive as a peasant you could not subsist off of common land, you had to pay rent to a lord and work their land, and as agricultural productivity increased through mechanization and improved farming techniques the lords only needed so many people to work. A subsistence farmer would become unable to afford rising rents, as they did not benefit from mechanization due to not having the capital to buy machines.
This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms?
It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!
Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.
The claim of the article is that expectations increase at a faster rate than the work becomes easier.
It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out.
If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no longer impressive to be able to make simple apps. You have to bring something different and better to the table. Good developers still do this on top of what AI can do by itself, but I also think there were a lot of relatively easy programming jobs where you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything. You had to know how to follow the rules, get easy tickets from the tracker, make enough changes that you could call it done, and then go on through the dog and pony show of getting the PR approved and getting those story points to count for your standup report. Repeat 5 days per week.
Every mid-size and larger company I worked for had a collection of developers like this: Not really trustworthy or skilled enough to handle big tickets, but you could assign all the loose ends and easy tickets to them. They’d get done eventually while the other devs could focus on bigger efforts.
Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around. An experienced developer can take 10 easy tickets, use their codebase knowledge to write targeted prompts with Opus or Fable, quickly review the code, and have all the easy work done in an afternoon. Then back to the hard tickets.
If you were one of those developers coasting on the easy work, this revolution probably feels like it increased expectations unfairly. If you were one of those devs doing the hard work, you have another tool to use but you’re still grinding away at the hard problems with an extra tool to make some of the parts easier.
The expectation is always that employees will do more for less. Employees are considered a cost, while their productive value is considered an entitlement, so the economics always push for cost reduction.
In practice businesses above a certain size accrete layers of make-work and bureaucracy, which is how you end up with "It takes three weeks to change a button" friction.
AI will make it easier to change the button, but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it.
The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.
for some lines of jobs the tooling progress might be objectively worth a lot, but then there's the less mechanical side of things, maybe teamwork, craft went down after power tools became common
something less positive i noticed, in offices, is that technology is not there to help you, management get sold something shiny to replace the old and dusty, the supplier assembles a bad team, implement crappy network, install new web stuff that is sluggish and requires new machines, and employees are left holding the bag. the new tech is often way more limited than the old junk (feature dropped, bad ergonomics for prolonged work, no more scripting options), the integrations are lacking, the people are not trained .. it's often a slow mess full of redundant steps and missed opportunities.
> Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.
Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.
There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.
EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.
There was a paternal element of duty-of-care-and-welfare to factory/business ownership in the UK - patchy, but very real - which flared briefly in the US but is completely absent now.
Corey Doctorow talks about the role of technology in society as not pre-determined, and I think this is mostly right. Trends are not inevitable.
At the same time, technology makes it easier to do one thing or another. And I think that’s the right framing for new technologies like AI: what does it make it easier to do? (It might be easier to answer that question by teasing apart the different technologies lumped together as “AI”.)
The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).
I personally think a good balance between tech and employees was the late 1980s.
You still had to hire people to do work and tech was good enough to help them out. As tech advanced, people started trusting what the systems said even if blatantly wrong and people started loosing work.
I just tried to check if one of my 8BitDo controller buttons can be remapped to guide button and now I want to kill myself too. It’s hard for me to accept that this shit is taking peoples jobs.
The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.
> pretty consistently improved
I can accept the premise that condiitions have improved, but not that it was consistent. It seems to me that it was anything but; more like extremely spiky. great depression, postwar economic miracle. Massive labor movements rose and fell, general strikes... Plus most countries have had several wars + revolutions in the last 200 years, including two world wars. Not all of those are to do with technology, but I also dont think technology wasnt indirectly responsible for the conditions that created some of them
Such a good comment, I would also add how much our perception of technology lifting conditions is conflated with the increased ability of governments to steer the economy to smooth things over.
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years
Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.
The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this.
You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.
I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions.
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years
They've improved, but not consistently on human timescales.
Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous. Things have, so far, trended better over time but they can be bad for whole generations and also past results do not guarantee future result
> The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity.
I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
> I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors".
We can and we will.
If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think.
> And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.
Labour conditions in the capitalist west 200 years ago were some of the worst in history, so it's easy to make yourself look good in comparison.
This seems obviously wrong as there are many counter examples. Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off. Mining mechanization made mines far less deadly and greatly reduced the human exertion required. I'd much rather harvest corn in an air conditioned combine vs. with an ox.
Even during the early industrial revolution, notorious for poor working conditions, people overlook why there was such high demand for those shitty jobs. The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside. A family's survival was dependent on a good harvest.
During the early industrial revolution people were not starving in the countryside because of poor harvests. They were starving in the countryside because the UK at that time siezed land that was previously held in common and granted it to the nobility through the enclosure acts. Now to survive as a peasant you could not subsist off of common land, you had to pay rent to a lord and work their land, and as agricultural productivity increased through mechanization and improved farming techniques the lords only needed so many people to work. A subsistence farmer would become unable to afford rising rents, as they did not benefit from mechanization due to not having the capital to buy machines.
This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms?
It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!
Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.
The claim of the article is that expectations increase at a faster rate than the work becomes easier.
It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out.
If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no longer impressive to be able to make simple apps. You have to bring something different and better to the table. Good developers still do this on top of what AI can do by itself, but I also think there were a lot of relatively easy programming jobs where you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything. You had to know how to follow the rules, get easy tickets from the tracker, make enough changes that you could call it done, and then go on through the dog and pony show of getting the PR approved and getting those story points to count for your standup report. Repeat 5 days per week.
Every mid-size and larger company I worked for had a collection of developers like this: Not really trustworthy or skilled enough to handle big tickets, but you could assign all the loose ends and easy tickets to them. They’d get done eventually while the other devs could focus on bigger efforts.
Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around. An experienced developer can take 10 easy tickets, use their codebase knowledge to write targeted prompts with Opus or Fable, quickly review the code, and have all the easy work done in an afternoon. Then back to the hard tickets.
If you were one of those developers coasting on the easy work, this revolution probably feels like it increased expectations unfairly. If you were one of those devs doing the hard work, you have another tool to use but you’re still grinding away at the hard problems with an extra tool to make some of the parts easier.
The expectation is always that employees will do more for less. Employees are considered a cost, while their productive value is considered an entitlement, so the economics always push for cost reduction.
In practice businesses above a certain size accrete layers of make-work and bureaucracy, which is how you end up with "It takes three weeks to change a button" friction.
AI will make it easier to change the button, but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it.
The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.
it was terrible for weavers
it was great for workers around the world who now can afford clothes
for some lines of jobs the tooling progress might be objectively worth a lot, but then there's the less mechanical side of things, maybe teamwork, craft went down after power tools became common
something less positive i noticed, in offices, is that technology is not there to help you, management get sold something shiny to replace the old and dusty, the supplier assembles a bad team, implement crappy network, install new web stuff that is sluggish and requires new machines, and employees are left holding the bag. the new tech is often way more limited than the old junk (feature dropped, bad ergonomics for prolonged work, no more scripting options), the integrations are lacking, the people are not trained .. it's often a slow mess full of redundant steps and missed opportunities.
Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.
> Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.
Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.
There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.
EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.
Yet people still have to work the same number of hours each day - they are performing the same amount of labor, just in a different form.
There’s more to labor than hours worked. Sitting at a computer for 8 hours is a different load than landscaping for 8 hours in the middle of summer.
Number of hours worked has actually been trending down for a very long time.
Most people landscape their own yards recreationally. They do it for fun, in their free time, at their own expense.
The 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.
It was explicitly socialist in the UK.
There was a paternal element of duty-of-care-and-welfare to factory/business ownership in the UK - patchy, but very real - which flared briefly in the US but is completely absent now.
It's still present in Europe, to varying degrees.
It was signed into law with the fair labour standards act of 1938, as part of the New Deal under FDR.
Corey Doctorow talks about the role of technology in society as not pre-determined, and I think this is mostly right. Trends are not inevitable.
At the same time, technology makes it easier to do one thing or another. And I think that’s the right framing for new technologies like AI: what does it make it easier to do? (It might be easier to answer that question by teasing apart the different technologies lumped together as “AI”.)
Marx actually has a bit about this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm...
The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).
idk I'm pretty glad to not be in the coal mines
This one is different. It makes the quality of consumption worse too.
I personally think a good balance between tech and employees was the late 1980s.
You still had to hire people to do work and tech was good enough to help them out. As tech advanced, people started trusting what the systems said even if blatantly wrong and people started loosing work.
Agent Smith was right when he was explaining The Matrix. Human civilization peaked in the 90's.
I'm sure forcing workers to use the chatbot that drives people to suicide is going to go great yeah.
I just tried to check if one of my 8BitDo controller buttons can be remapped to guide button and now I want to kill myself too. It’s hard for me to accept that this shit is taking peoples jobs.