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Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

Actually the real danger is mass labor market disruption, and a massive shift of power from labour to capital.

As was highlighted in previous discussions, the industrial revolution took 80 years to start benefiting workers. The continued impact of automation at least contributed to the rise of right wing extremism and an erosion of democracy all over the west. Now we face a development that has the potential to be faster than those that came before, in the context of political systems more fragile and worse equipped to manage the change.

So yeah, disrupting the status quo can absolutely be dangerous. It has been dangerous (and deadly) in the past and in the present.

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> the industrial revolution took 80 years to start benefiting workers

Come on. This is dishonesty and isn't the reality. We may agree that the Industrial Revolution may have taken decades (certainly not 80 years) for its benefits to be *clearly and widely* felt by workers, but anything further is an abusive claim. So what, because the progress doesn't benefit to workers instantly, we shouldn't do it ?

In the end, whatever your position, industrialization eventually raised living standards. So what's wrong with that ?

> The continued impact of automation at least contributed to the rise of right wing extremism and an erosion of democracy all over the west

This is oversimplifying and correlation at the best, not causation

You asked where the danger was, the response told you that disrupting the status quo can be dangerous.

"Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval."

From half way through this (meandering) blog post:

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

As for the populism link, that is well established empirically:

https://academic.oup.com/oxrep/article-abstract/34/3/418/504...

https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12485/we-were-the-robots...

Etc...

Edit: Just found this when looking up sources, I haven't had time to look at it but just dumping it here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

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