alt Hacker NewsHighly recommend people learn the history of the Industrial Revolution. I recently discovered the Industrial Revolutions Podcast[1] and have been enjoying it. What's happening today isn't unprecedented. The pace of change that's happening IS similar to periods of the industrial revolution.
For example, the flying jenny, overnight, basically put an entire craft industry of weaving into question. Probably more dramatically than anything Claude Code ever did.
It took A LOT and several world wars for brief periods of normalcy post WW2 - probably the exception, not the rule.
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Thomas Picketty does indeed argue in Capital in the 21st Century that the post World War 2 period is indeed an exception in terms of inequality being lower while historically it is not, and it is reverting back to the mean of there being more inequality these days, yet people bemoan the idea of not being able to live off a single job when in reality that was never guaranteed.
The jobless French artisans who couldn't compete with English industrial imports was one of the causes of the French Revolution.
The circumstances are similar, but the people are different. Look outside: this is WALL-E.
At the start I think everyone thought the industrial revolution could be a useful historical reference.
But what AI is selling is the obliteration of human knowledge work.
It just isn’t informative for that.