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points by guitarlimeo 1 day ago | 0 comments

Everyone always wants to compare this revolution to the Industrial Revolution but there's a saying "history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes". There are similarities, and reading how people coped back then can be helpful, but also this is a completely different revolution!

The only themes that rhyme imo are the loss of power to a smaller subset of humans (owners) and technological advancement enabling us to produce more (not necessarily better quality) with smaller costs. But people think that the history will repeat itself, and Jevons paradox will hold true, because it held in the Industrial Revolution; quote from the article: "Eventually, everything should be fine. The technology will be more powerful, and the job will still be there, it’ll just look different."

In this revolution, what if instead of being the human that invented the steam engine, we are the horses? "What happened to all the horses replaced by machines after industrialization? Humans keep a few around for entertainment but that’s about it." [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147755

[–] madaxe_again 1 day ago

Sure, but horses today have unbelievably good lives compared to horses of the past. The Industrial Revolution basically introduced post-scarcity for horses.

[–] adhoc_slime 1 day ago

How quickly we forget the glue factories in between the pre-industrialisation and post industrialisation.

[–] madaxe_again 1 day ago

Glue factories are seemingly a fixture of history. One can but hope to be a favoured horse.

[–] tomaskafka 1 day ago

Also it took 80 years of events with “massacre” in name to estabilish basic limitations on capital class, like not exploiting children or allowing people to work less than 6x12 hours per week.

[–] rayiner 1 day ago

Wow that chronology is backward. My dad’s very non-capitalist village in Bangladesh “exploited children” in the sense that children must work hard in an agrarian society for the community to survive. It was capitalism that gave us the luxury of creating the concept of childhood without manual labor.

[–] francisofascii 1 day ago

yes, and unfortunately kids are still working in textiles and mining in other countries.