Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#31

Post by palmotea » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 10:39 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #27

briga wrote: post #21

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.

> 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 results. > The cases where it didn't were…

> 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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#32

Post by Fricken » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

briga wrote: post #21

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.

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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#33

Post by VirusNewbie » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #30

briga wrote: post #21

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.

> 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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#34

Post by janalsncm » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 10:45 PM UTC

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”.)

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#35

Post by Majora320 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #24

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 ove…

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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#36

Post by i000 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 10:56 PM UTC

RugnirViking wrote: post #25

briga wrote: post #21

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 d…

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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#37

Post by gruez » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #30

briga wrote: post #21

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.

> 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.

>to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.

Was this ever true? During the 1950s, (the perceived heyday of American middle class wealth) the female labor force participation rate was 35%[1], which was close half of the male labor force participation rate.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#38

Post by cluckindan » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

siavosh wrote: post #29

briga wrote: post #21

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 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.

Everything changed with floating currency. Inflation became a tool for centralization of ownership.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#39

Post by heylook » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

briga wrote: post #21

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.

You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they only sorta sometimes were able to retrain for the new jobs, and the working conditions in those new jobs were atrocious, exactly because they were new enough that we didn't yet have safety regulations for them.

It was only their children who eventually saw any improvement in working/living conditions, and it was only because of all the absolutely awful things that happened to their parents. Safety regulations are written in blood. It only looks like consistent improvement if you zoom out to a level that obscures intra-generation experiences. At the level of the actual human beings subjected to the turbulence, it was awful.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#40

Post by paulfharrison » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

A comment by Norbert Wiener on translation machines (published 1993 but written somewhat earlier in "Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas"):

"Thus the effect of the machine of this sort in intellectual work may be to decrease the number of first class brains needed but to increase, and greatly increase, the demands made on these brains."