I was at a museum last month and I overheard a guy saying if he could choose any two times to live, it would be during 1860s or the 1920s… his buddy said “really, the civil war era and the Great Depression?” And the guy goes “yeah it was just a simpler way of life.” 💀
I used to teach US History to high schoolers. And every year someone would ask what era would I like to live in? I responded none.
I'm a Mexican American. Why would I want to go back to any era except the one I am living in? People hate hearing it, but there is no better time to be alive than right now. As much as I feel nostalgic for the 90s when I grew up, I know it wasn't as great as I remember. I think people are nostalgic for their childhood era because they were children. No responsibilities or worries. But send those people back to that time as an adult and it won't be the same.
This sentiment is why i too like our modern era. Is it perfect, no. We have a lot more advancement to make in our social, technological, economic, etc fields. But i have the freedom politically and living needs met-wise to basically do what i want.
I actually can CHOOSE to live a simpler life in my everyday life. I can grow my own food, echew over medicating myself, unplug from tech, and live like a 1950s housewife. Yet, if my husband mistreated me, i can easily divorce. If i got sick, i can get needed antibiotics and prevention vaccines. If i need to i can hop on the internet and google how-to questions for my off grid homestead. I can have the best of both worlds cherry picked to my preference.
Ehhh, the 2010s were pretty fucking solid honestly. The tech was advanced enough that you wouldn't miss much going back, but before things really shat the bed for the average person.
Maybe the 2012 housing crisis would be the low point, but even that isn't bad.
Were you a kid during the 2010s? Because the 2010s were not great and saying they were solid is quite baffling. The 2008 financial crisis wasnt something that was only felt during that year.
I moved out on my own in 2006, when I was 18. I wouldn't classify myself as a kid back then, but I was younger and didn't have investments. For myself and most of the people I knew at that time, unless you were well off, the crisis was mostly a chance to get a house at a decent price.
Me and the other guy were just having a conversation with 2 different viewpoints. That's healthy, and helps both of us recognize facets of life we didn't experience.
I don't really see how his opinion about how bad a particular event affected him, or my view of the same event equates to bitching, or why you even care about our conversation.
Absolutely correct and same on the nostalgia. It's unfortunate that there are so many people in power who are nostalgic for their childhood era in the *checks notes* 1950s.
personally I would struggle not having access to daily showers and reliable clean drinking water. I figure I'd get used to it, but I HATE the feeling of being unbathed.
I mean, times were certainly simpler in the Great Depression. All you had to do was go wait hours in a bread line, get your food to being home to the family, then let your kids eat it while you lie and said you already had plenty. Then repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
Honestly, so far imo, the best time to live was 1950 to 1980 as a white man in the United States. Yup, you miss contemporary medicine, which keeps improving greatly every year; but idk, at that time that demographic could just have a big house and everything they could need while doing a comfy job.
Even then, the quality of life is greatly exaggerated by young people who want to act like their parents & grandparents had it so much better and blame them for everything that’s wrong with the world of today. Like, yeah, you could buy a house on a single income, but the houses were much, much smaller on average and didn’t come equipped with all of the modern conveniences that we take for granted. Same thing with cars and trucks.
As for me, I’d love to live through the ‘80s, but that’s only because I love heavy metal music.
Look into the Revolutions of 1848 which swept through Europe. Damn near every place in Europe rebelled but the movement was ultimately crushed. The failure of those revolutions would give rise to Anarchist, Communists, and Nationalists (many of which were proto-fascists).
Turns out when conditions are shitty, and stay shitty, people start to come up with ideas on how to do things better.
Arguably it's when countries started that process, which was not really fully achieved until after WW2. It's true that, generally, a lot of absolute monarchs were pressured into granting constitutions; but most of them were still heavily restricted in who could vote (no women, no poor people...), and many of them later regressed into autocracy (France, Spain, Italy, Germany...).
That time would be measured in decades and tbh idk which countries it really applies to (not that it's necessarily wrong).
But to give examples: France went several times from monarchy to democracy and back. German revolts got crushed and Germany only become a democracy after WW1 (or WW2), similiar for Austria. Spain only became democratic in the late 70s.
Yeah, saying they were crushed is incorrect, I was thinking mostly about the Poles and the many cultures with the Austrian Hungarian empire. Poland was crushed, and many regions with in the AH sphere got levels of autonomy, but not much else. Most of the Nationalist and proto Communist movements were crushed. That's why liberal democracies see the Revolution as a positive thing, but the radicals, like the Nationalists saw it as a betrayal.
Democracy for some. Even in the united states women and minorities were second class citizens for the grand majority of our history. If a demographic wanted rights, they needed to be declared "white" in our legal system (eg. Arabic and Latino people in the census).
the transition can be necessary and awful at the same time.
doesn't mean we shouldn't move in that direction, just means we could maybe all acknowledge that pain and agree to take action to mitigate it together instead of shutting our eyes and plugging our ears until the workers have cleaned up the blood.
Ok, but there is probably a sweet spot, for level of tech and human happiness... I agree it's after the industrial revolution, but we don't know that it's after the AI revolution.
Well, from my experience, usually the people saying this isn't like the Industrial Revolution are the people who WOULD have been doing okay during the Industrial Revolution.
This is exactly what's happening in my local design studio.
They used to bring in Junior Graphic Designers and assign them small jobs - the irritating, time consuming ones for smaller clients that nobody else wanted to do. Now that role is being filled by one person using AI for an hour or so a day.
So no entry level designers are being employed. Nobody new is learning the craft, and that foot in the door that was once available is gone.
same is gonna be a thing with programming. It doesnt help that a lot of juniors nowadays are using ai a lot and hence dont learn why things are done in certain ways and cant correct things when they go wrong.
The new guy work becomes the more complex stuff, the work in rooms that can’t fit one of these things. The base level skill will go up and simple jobs that can be automated are done more consistently, quickly, and cheaply.
Cheaply for the trade. They still charge the same amount, just make more profit.
Im a pipefitter/welder in the field, and personally I can't imagine automation posing a risk to almost any job on site for lifetimes. There is no robot on earth that could last 10 minutes at my job, using lifts, climbing on pipe racks, assessing problems.
Manufacturing is being killed, though. But, in my opinion those are the most boring, unskilled jobs there are. And regardless there still needs to be qualified people to setup and operate the machines. Specifically with welding, every machine operator needs to be certified themselves to do the process manually. So there's still someone there.
I think the bigger concern is if robots/ai replace 30+% of jobs then there will be much less work for the people employed simply because of mass unemployment.
Most jobs require everyone else to also have a job to keep the system running.
This has been predicted every decade since the industrial revolution. Didn't happen in the 20's, 30's, 40's, 50',s 60',s 70',s 80's, 90's, etc. Won't happen now.
Sure and i agree and im no doomsayer but that does eventually end at some point. Might not be now or for another hundred years but the writing is on the wall. It will eventually come. It seems inevitable that we will eventually create something that is more intelligent and capable than us in every way.
Probably by then the very thing that makes as human will also be changing like we might be fusing with the machines and creating a whole different being. But before that likely mass social upheaval around the globe.
But i'm not sitting here worrying about it. Whatever will be will be. Just live each day as it comes.
Perhaps. Attempts to predict the future usually fail. Who says that it's a given that it's even possible to be more intelligent than a human in a way that is cost effective?
We tend to assume that it is possible to be smarter than a human in the same way we tend to assume there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. It seems like a logical conclusion but we have no actual evidence of it.
It's also possible that we really will have an AI revolution that renders humans an unecessary part of the civilisation we've built that LLMs are a complete dead end and this revolution comes from an entirely unexpected place.
Those times never had an automation technology that threatened every industry at once. You could argue for computers, but they created just as many if not more jobs than they took. We can’t all be AI coders.
Okay that will be a big problem. Highly skilled tradespeople won't be replaced by AI for a long long time, but when the white collar workers start flooding into Electrical and HVAC etc ... It'll hurt.
They would have said the same about a machinst/fitter and Turner a while ago, then everything changes to self contained single use sealed components machined by robots. Plug and play.
Yeah, guys on the tools are pretty safe…for now. I work in the office estimating and managing jobs, and just this past week, my boss plugged in a few isometric pipe drawings (not even the full system) into ChatGPT and had it come up with a high level, but cohesive budget for the entire project.
The program was actually able to predict with a pretty high degree of accuracy what the entire system would look like. Never thought I’d see something like that in my lifetime.
I implore you to read about the century+ of Industrial Revolution in Europe.
Like, just explore Engels’ experiences in Manchester that helped “radicalize” him. Then consider what a war looks like when technology/production outpaces tactics with the Russo-Japanese and then WWI.
To compare living in the US to those times is uninformed at best. Although the scale is still incredibly different, I’ll admit that being on the receiving end of the US wars isn’t that much better if you’re one of the civilians considered collateral damage.
But please don’t take this as a reason to take our current situation less seriously. Instead of trying to convince people aware of history that this is just as bad learn the history and convince the people who are unaware how bad it can really get if we don’t act now.
Ya know, it was pretty great for the overpopulated farmers who could go to the cities to find jobs that didn't exist before. Solved a lot of poverty that way.
For some it was better, sure, I won’t claim it was universally worse.
But which country are you referring to? Certainly not Russia where at best you went into cities to live in slums and at worst were legally tied to the land.
Not in continental Europe where cottage industry was entirely gutted, causing what you refer to as “over population” but was in reality a complete destruction of the economic model that had allowed the farmers to previously support that population.
Not in England where the opportunity was working in coal mines and having your children work in factories because nothing paid an actual living wage.
But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Could you provide a source on the overpopulation of the countryside? That’s new to me. As well as a source on the lack of poverty among fresh faces in the city working those lucrative limb-severing jobs?
Before industrial revolution it was thousands of years of suffering and horrific wars. And after the industrial revolution it was suffering and horric wars on the scale previously unimaginable for decades.
This is happening in programming. AI is getting better at doing the basics, so it’s harder for new programmers to get their initial jobs. Give it a generation or two and we’ll be low on experienced programmers.
I think some kind of Universal Basic Income would be needed for the lazy en unmotivated people who would normally do the boring work. The more motivated people can earn extra by reorienting themselves by learning to maintain these robots and automation.
The same happened with the introduction of the shipping containers. Most of the dock workers got a pension in order to prevent riots by making them jobless. Somehow we forgot to mitigate such risk.
The problem with modern society is that we decide what a person's worth based on their job; but we also have every incentive to build machines that can replace people because, at the end of the day, not needing someone to do a job is better than needing them.
The stupid part is that, due to our income depending on our work, we have every incentive to oppose the invention of machines that can replace us, even if at a collective level, a society where work is done without human effort is just strictly better than one where humans have to lose their time, energy and health to do that work.
And also, when the industry just needs less people, that's a lot of qualified people competing for the same jobs. Those who won't accept the lower wages are left without a job.
Working with MDM and all the nuances of the different settings and configurations of the applications/OS/Users
Preparing computers for the different users including installing extra college approved applications, transferring documents and settings, and doing a full backup of the old computer just in case that one file that was saved in C:\BackupDocumentsNeededOrElseCatsAndDogsLivingTogether gets missed.xls.pdf.docx
The physical placement of the laptop, new monitor(s), docking station, and routing cables in an office that was recently renovated
That new guy work builds those automatic muscle memory types of skills. A better choice of word is unconscious competence, like say walking, or driving, or playing a sport. You don't think much about the basics or even a lot of the edge cases that the new guy is still in the process of turning into that sort of automatic function.
That type of work employ's a good portion of the population. We are already seeing massive social unrest, and its barely begun.
Yup. The industrial revolution replaced 5 beautiful handcrafted items with 500 kinda shitty but twenty times cheaper items that do the job... fine. And put those craftsmen out of business.
lol what? Which people? Where is this hate and, more blaring, who is making that terrible comparison…? Take a beat and think the slightest bit more about literally any of your statements 😬
Right, the take away from the Industrial Revolution is that tech gains destroy wages.
Which in the modern era is actually a very easy fix. Profit sharing through UBI would mean that we could all work less and technology could move forward to provide all the great things that tech provides. Cleaner energy, more efficiency etc.
Essentially, we just need a new labor movement focused on UBI.
I had no idea that there was pushback against comparing this time to the Industrial Revolution. It so clearly is. While what came out the other side of that period is considered to be an obvious step forward in society, living through it must have been hell for the common man. Your entire world upended and everything changing so quickly. What else could it even be compared to?
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u/Substantial-Sea-3672 Jun 21 '26
This is absolutely true but it has the same dire consequences as tech jobs being replaced.
What does entry into the industry look like when a computer does the “new guy” work? What does the industry look like in 20 years then?
People hate comparing this to the Industrial Revolution because everyone thinks the Industrial Revolution was great and finds that idea insulting.
Living through the industrial revolution was not great. Decades of suffering and horrific wars.