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Comment by convolvatron | Hacker News Reader

I dont think it's the same at all. when weaving was displaced, yes some people were pissed about losing their livelihood, but the quality of the cloth didn't diminish.

when CNC came for machining, no one really bitched, because the computers were just removing the time consuming effort of moving screws by hand.

when computers write code, or screenplays, the quality right now is objectively much worse. that might change, but claims that we're at the point where computers can meaningfully displace that work are pretty weak.

sure that might change.

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Cloth absolutely has gotten worse over the last two hundred years since industrialization. It's also orders of magnitude cheaper, making it worth it, and certainly new types of cloth are available that weren't before, but we're not better off in every possible way.

>but we're not better off in every possible way

I'd argue that we are, because cloth of higher quality than anything that has ever existed before is available today, it's just really expensive. But high quality cloth was also expensive back then.

I think you are making the error of comparing cheap clothes of today with expensive clothes of the past, rather than cheap clothes with cheap clothes and expensive with expensive. People of the past might have had higher quality clothes on average, but its because those clothes were expensive despite being the cheapest available. Trust me, if Shein was around in 1780, everyone would be wearing that garbage.

We're definitely worse off when fabric now is mostly synthetic fabrics that flood the environment with microplastics, and last a much shorter amount of time. Of course, that's good for the fashion industry since it means they can sell more often.

Is there any type of clothing that existed in the 1800s that you could actually not buy or have custom made today?

On the other hand, you could not buy a Gore-Tex Pro shell or an ultralight down jacket for any price in 1800.

Dhaka muslin most famously isn't producible today due to a lack of knowledge. More broadly a lot of weaving techniques have been lost since they don’t make sense to do with machinery.

I don’t disagree that there are a lot of gains, including on net, just that it hasn’t been a pareto improvement with no losses at all.

The result being worse generally doesn't stop humans from being displaced. Clothes made today are notably worse than the handmade ones.

Is clothes today really worse?

We have clothes and materials like gortex now that blocks rain and snow no handmade jacket could ever hope to perform at the same level to be lightweight AND dry.

> We have clothes and materials like gortex now that blocks rain and snow no handmade jacket could ever hope to perform at the same level to be lightweight AND dry.

At the cost of massive environmental, animal and human health.

The available quality of cloth did, in fact, diminish.

Hold up, why it changed matters to parent-poster's argument. Consider the difference between:

1. "The technology's capability was inferior to what humans were creating, therefore the quality of the output dropped."

2. "The costs of employing humans created a floor to the price/quality you could offer and still make a profit. Without the human labor, a lower-quality product became possible to offer."

The first is a question of engineering, the second is a question of economic choice and market-fit.

Some of both.

The fabric and clothes were worse, and cheaper. This put many traditional workers out of business, making actually good clothes scarcer, and eventually, more expensive than they previously were.

I think the poster's "LLMs are not like textile machines" point hinges on whether a step down in quality is required due to engineering issues or not, at least for an equivalent product. (E.g. bulk cloth, rather than fine embroidery.)

I'm talking about equivalent products. The cloth made by machine during the Industrial Revolution was meaningfully worse in quality than the hand-made stuff.

Not really. Polymers in clothes are everywhere and they have very désirable properties compared to pure cotton. Untreated cotton had many problems.

Materials other than cotton (like wool and leather) existed.

yup, but polymers are much, much cheaper to produce. And some have properties that no natural fabric can offer.

> properties that no natural fabric can offer

like polluting every inch of the Earth with microplastics!

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