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Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

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Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#31

Post by avereveard »

hamper653 wrote: post #14

Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism. When capitalism expands (be it by replacing older modes of production, or through rebuilding after a world war), it always has steady growth. When there’s nowhere left to expand to, the machine always grips. Technical progress doesn’t prevent this outcome, it accelerates it. More productivit…

agree, technology doesn't change the basic mechanism of capitalism so I don't think this will be different, the only real question is how far means of production will be in term of capital intensity from upper class, which will decide if the outcome will be victorian golden age or robber baron age

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#32

Post by TacticalCoder »

azan_ wrote: post #22
ernst_klim wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I believe that growth caused by the rise of IT, be it Internet or LLM, will be marginal, because the benefits for humanity are very marginal compared to that caused by steam engine, wing, antibiotics or telegraph. Everything IT does is slightly simplifying things we already could do. We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup…

That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering in e.g. medicine. Modern drug discovery would be impossible without advances in computation, and we are getting breakthrough drugs all the time thanks to that. > We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transporta…

> That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering ...

You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#33

Post by delusional »

hamper653 wrote: post #14

Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism. When capitalism expands (be it by replacing older modes of production, or through rebuilding after a world war), it always has steady growth. When there’s nowhere left to expand to, the machine always grips. Technical progress doesn’t prevent this outcome, it accelerates it. More productivit…

> More productivity means less labour per productive cycle, hence less profit.

That might give the reader the wrong impression. It is the same labour, but spread out over more commodities. You won't get to work less.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#34

Post by epolanski »

Any parallel should be taken with a grain of salt.

In any case, I'd like to make two points about the job market.

1. Yes, it is true that the job market recovered from the machine-ization of agriculture and industry. What's never mentioned, is that it took 80 years for the UK's job market to recover occupation and salaries seen at the beginning of the 1800s.

Europe's salaries and occupational levels were hit with a similar cataclysm as machines started appearing in the agricultural fields. That prompted millions and millions of Europeans to flee Europe for the Americas. Again, sure, the job market did recover, depending on the specific western European country between the 1960s and 1970s. That's between 50 to 70 years of slump. Almost twice the average person's career in a long lasting job market slump.

Please remind that to people that "AI will not impact job markets or will do so positively" using previous technological advancements as examples, that might be very well true but on a very undefined and likely very long time frame.

2. At no point in history a technical revolution threatened all kind of jobs at the same time, it always hit specific sectors like manufacturing or agriculture. Not all of them at once, manual and intellectual.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#35

Post by throw0101a »

The century from 1870 is filled with many one-time only developments that will never happen again:

Things like accepting germ theory (so treating sewage and drinking water), the development of vaccines and antibiotics, the creation of mechanical motion (previously biological methods, in the horse, was the fastest mode), electricity (artificial light that did not entail burning things), mechanical/electrical calculation of numbers.

These jumps in productivity/efficiency will never happen again, so expecting corresponding jumps in growth that they led to is not reasonable:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...

Certain new inventions and refinements of existing ones will continue, but it is hard to think of things that will improve people's lives as, say, clean drinking water.

One things that could be done is more redistributive tax policies, like existed post-WW2, so as to better spread around the current income and wealth in a less concentrated way.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#36

Post by mahkeiro »

zapkyeskrill wrote: post #9
blfr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the speedups and conveniences of modern IT and the Internet have been massive: I can bank from my pocket, review the best photos out of 100k+ just when riding a tram, get virtually any good produced anywhere delivered to my doorstep in 1-3 business days (and it will be the exact kind and make I chose, not something that happened to be available), read virtually any book ever published while my appointment is…

And most of the time savings gained from all this is blown on grind clicking "social media" so net effect is, yes, close to zero (or in more modern terms, not 100x, not 10x, but 1x at most).

I mean that’s to you as well as spending your time at the swimming pool.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#37

Post by mahkeiro »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #32
azan_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering in e.g. medicine. Modern drug discovery would be impossible without advances in computation, and we are getting breakthrough drugs all the time thanks to that. > We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transporta…

> That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering ... You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.

I wonder if people saying this really had an active life before Internet because if you do the change is so massive that it’s difficult to comprehend.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#39

Post by chii »

bluegatty wrote: post #30

No - the growth today is capital expenditures, not productivity. To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework. AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will. A better comparison might be railroads.

Why is railroad a better comparison?
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