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littlestymaaryesterday at 3:04 PM4 repliesview on HN

The agricultural revolution did in fact reduce the amount of work in society by a lot though. That's why we can have week-ends, vacation, retirement and study instead of working from non stop 12yo to death like we did 150 years earlier.

Reducing the amount of work done by humans is a good thing actually, though the institutional structures must change to help spread this reduction to society as a whole instead of having mass unemployment + no retirement before 70 and 50 hours work week for those who work.

AI isn't a problem, unchecked capitalism can be one.


Replies

vunderbayesterday at 3:23 PM

That's not really why (at least in the U.S.) - it was due to strong labor laws otherwise post industrial revolution you'd still have people working 12 hours a day 7 days a week - though with minimum wage stagnation one could argue that many people have to do this anyway just to make ends meet.

https://firmspace.com/theproworker/from-strikes-to-labor-law...

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UncleOxidantyesterday at 3:16 PM

The agricultural revolution has been very beneficial for feeding more people with less labor inputs, but I'm kind of skeptical of the claim that it led to weekends (and the 40hr workweek). Those seem to have come from the efforts of the labor movement on the manufacturing side of things (late 19th, early 20th century). Business interests would have continued to work people 12hrs a day 7 days a week (plus child labor) to maximize profits regardless of increasing agricultural efficiency.

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AngryDatatoday at 5:27 AM

Agricultural work is seasonal. For most of the year you aren't working in the fields. Yes planting and harvesting can require longer hours because you need the planting and harvest done as fast as possible in order to maximize yield and reduce spoilage, but you aren't harvesting and planting the fields for the entire year working non-stop. And even then most people worked at their own pace, not every farm was as labor productive as another or even had to be as productive. Some people valued their time and health and comfort, some people valued being able to brew more beer with their 5% higher yield, some valued leisure time more, but it was a personal choice that people made. The industrial revolution is the outlier point in making people work long non-stop hours all the time. Living a subsidence farming lifestyle doesn't mean you are just hanging on a bare thread of survival the entire time like a lot of pop-media likes to portray.

bilsbieyesterday at 3:10 PM

Medical is our fastest growing employer and you could make the case that modern agriculture produced most of that demand:

Obesity, mineral depletion, pesticides, etc.

So in a way automation did make more work.