I'm confused - you're suggesting that past suffering justifies present suffering?

My first day of orientation at the CS dept was at the height of the dot com crash. I think I got told by 20+ seniors that day to drop out before paying a single bill. That it was all pointless and the internet was an over valued bubble and no one was getting hired. Mood on campus was scary for almost two years post the crash. If we had social media back then I can only imagine how much more fears would have been amplified.

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KK7NIL 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He's pointing out that labor has always opposed labor saving technology, despite that being the basis of our modern quality of life.

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ryandrake 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining. This time it might be truly different. If one day AI can actually do all knowledge work, there might not be anything left for former knowledge workers to do. There's no physical law that says new technology necessarily produces 1:1 new, different jobs.

	▲	KK7NIL 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining. Labor saving technology does not create enough alternative jobs to employ all those that it displaced, otherwise it wouldn't be labor saving. Instead, the surplus created by these technologies allows that society to deploy labor on less immediately necessary jobs. These jobs weren't created by the technology, they were always there, but society did not have the resources to staff them (think education, research, academia, merchants, etc.) This dynamic has been true since pre-historic times, so you'll need some extraordinary evidence if you want us to believe this time is different.

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hello_moto 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Many people who pointed out the Industrial Revolution becomes the basis of modern quality of life skip what happened in between the 17xx-18xx until today.

Things like Unions, Wars, etc.

What comes after new technology has always been the elite class owning them all and forcing everybody else to suffer until something managed the distribution of resources slightly better (War forces that).