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Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
- dude250711 1mo agoThis one is different. It makes the quality of consumption worse too.
- jmclnx 1mo agoI 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.
- ooterness 1mo agoAgent Smith was right when he was explaining The Matrix. Human civilization peaked in the 90's.
- lowsong 1mo agoI'm sure forcing workers to use the chatbot that drives people to suicide is going to go great yeah.
- wao0uuno 1mo agoI 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.
- taeric 1mo agoThis 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.
- Fricken 1mo agoLabour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.
- tptacek 1mo agoThe 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.
- TheOtherHobbes 1mo agoIt 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.
- Fricken 1mo agoIt was signed into law with the fair labour standards act of 1938, as part of the New Deal under FDR.
- Aurornis 1mo ago> 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.
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- Havoc 1mo agoidk I'm pretty glad to not be in the coal mines
- blpbloopcmpt 1mo ago[dead]
- maxbendick 1mo agoMarx actually has a bit about this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#:~:text=bump%20of%20Christianity.-,C.%20Intensification%20of%20Labour,-The%20immoderate%20lengthening 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).
- appreciatorBus 1mo ago[flagged]
- mekael 1mo agoThere’s communism the theoretical idea and “communism” the application. The twentieth century was neither, but just authoritarianism wearing a trench-coat.
- ihm 1mo agoWhat part of Marx's work do you think has been disproven?
- shellkr 1mo agoThis point could be made on every ideology.. Capitalism in essence is pretty gruesome too. The enlightenment, american and french revolutions and the labor movement was stuff that moved the pin in the right direction.
- maxbendick 1mo agoMarx builds on Smith. Would you agree then that Adam Smith is disproven even more and responsible for far more starvation? That would be ridiculous.
- tomhow 1mo agoPlease don't post flamebait or engage in ideological battle on HN. We've asked you this before. We have to ban accounts that keep commenting like this. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- briga 1mo agoThe 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.
- RugnirViking 1mo ago> 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
- i000 1mo agoSuch 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.
- hparadiz 1mo agoAll of those problems had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with economic mismanagement. And the commies were the worst at it. The US never had famines even at the worst of the great depression.
- smallmancontrov 1mo agoHow much of the last ~25 years of outsized capital returns in the US came from selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China?
- aeternum 1mo agoThis 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.
- BigTTYGothGF 1mo ago> Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off I think there was something else going on that might explain that.
- Majora320 1mo agoDuring 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.
- aeternum 1mo agoYes agreed, but the net result is that living in the countryside was far from romanticized agrarian life people often picture it as. Lords owning land was a very old idea, it's a bit of a leap to say that was due to mechanization.
- noosphr 1mo agoBecuase they would quit and work anywhere else after a few days. In 1913 Ford had to hire over 52,000 workers just to maintain an active factory workforce of 14,000. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor... > The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside. Because their land was stolen during enclosure.
- janalsncm 1mo agoCorey 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”.)
- paulfharrison 1mo agoA 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."
- tennisflyi 1mo agoCorrect
- DaedalusII 1mo agoThere was a time when life was much simpler. We would all walk a few miles down to the 'station then have breakfast and read the 'paper while the steam smoke hung thick in the air Then we all had to move to cars. The fire man, stations, engineers, and conductors all lost their jobs, and the commute got 10 times more intense. Now we had to drive our own cars, follow road rules, maintain our cars, and find parking
- gulugawa 1mo agoThis reminds me of watching JIRA go downhill over 10 years as it incorporated new technnology. I used to be a scrum master who helped manage the team JIRA ticket board. When running into the inevitable problem during a meeting, I would sarcastically make a comment about "JIRA's monthly downgrade". By the time I stopped using JIRA in early 2025, it had become noticeably slower and had a bunch of UI clutter that made it difficult to do basic tasks. I checked the homepage for Atlassian, which owns JIRA, and it has a headline saying: "Unleash your teams and their agents"
- wolvesechoes 1mo agoTo a casual reader of this thread - look at comments, this is what ideology is.