Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, this is nonsense. There have been lots of periods of industrialization and they didn't all result in mass starvation and penury. In fact, many of them _reduced_ poverty by freeing people to focus on new fields in which they had a better comparative advantage than they had at ditch-digging and partially reducing the economic incentive for enslaving others.

Does it, though? I don't think all the sledgehammer swingers starved to death when the jackhammer was invented.

> if a ditch digging machine does all that work automatically the result is... that the ditch diggers starve to death

What evidence do you have to support such an implausible claim?

No, they just become unhappy retail workers, for example.