Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
Technological change has historically reduced the need for labor, but many argue it hasn’t reliably improved workers’ lives, instead shifting effort, intensifying expectations, or degrading conditions for at least a generation. Commenters compare past revolutions like mechanical looms, mining mechanization, and office computing to today’s AI tools, debating whether they merely deskill and displace “easy” jobs or genuinely ease workloads and raise living standards. Underneath is a broader concern over who captures the gains from productivity—capital or labor—and how housing costs, weakened labor power, and policy choices shape whether new tech makes life better or worse for most people.
Scope of Tech’s Impact on Workers
- Some argue most major technologies (looms, factory machinery) initially made conditions worse for specific groups of workers (e.g., skilled weavers), even while lowering prices for consumers.
- Others counter with examples where tech clearly improved workers’ lives: safer and less strenuous mining, mechanized farming, Ford-era factory gains in wages and time off.
- A recurring theme: tech often reduces headcount and deskills some roles, but whether this is “worse” depends on distribution of gains and available alternatives.
AI and Modern Knowledge Work
- AI is seen as accelerating “intensification of labour”: same or longer hours, but with much higher throughput and responsibility.
- Several comments describe AI as eliminating “easy ticket” programming jobs and raising expectations for remaining developers, benefiting top performers but squeezing mediocre or stagnant ones.
- Concern that AI tools are making both work and consumption lower quality and more alienating; some users describe genuine distress using AI-infused products.
Work Hours, Effort, and Job Quality
- Disagreement over whether “labour-saving devices” actually save workers labour:
- One side: day length may be similar, but physical exertion and drudgery have fallen dramatically (power tools, search, office software).
- Other side: hours remain similar, and expectations simply rise, so workers do more/different labour rather than less.
- Historical examples (mechanical looms, industrial revolution) used to show that initial conditions can be horrendous and improvements arrive only after struggle and regulation.
Wages, Middle Class, and Inequality
- One camp claims conditions and wages have “pretty consistently” improved over 200 years; critics say progress is spiky, with entire generations badly hit.
- Disputes over data: some say real wages (or total compensation) have risen; others cite flat or declining inflation-adjusted wages since the 1970s and longer annual hours.
- Strong focus on housing costs: many see the shrinking ability to buy a home on a single income as central to perceived decline of the middle class.
Institutions, Policy, and Power
- Multiple comments emphasize that technology’s effects are mediated by power, bargaining, and policy, not predetermined by the tech itself.
- Labour movements, regulation, and government economic management are portrayed as key to turning productivity gains into better conditions rather than pure extraction.
- Side debates touch on inflation, deficit spending, “robber barons,” and globalization as examples of how gains from tech and trade can be unequally captured.
Management, Tools, and “Upgrades”
- Office tech changes are often experienced as regressions: slower, clunkier systems, worse ergonomics, lost scripting/customization, and management buying “shiny” tools that hinder workers.
- Example: long-term users see some modern enterprise software as degraded over time despite “new technology,” reinforcing the sense that tech is deployed to control or monitor rather than help.