Medical advances are more important than post docs
iirc back in the day chemists synthesized a whole bunch of random compounds, observed their effects (in mice etc., or even the chemists tasting them!) then did clinical trials to measure safety and efficacy.
high-throughput screening of chemical libraries on in vitro assays is the modern version of this. "rational" drug design, which uses understanding of mechanisms to design chemical structures for a specific purpose, largely failed back in the '80s.
Opinions are mixed. Some folks will say that it's morally imperative to cure people even if we don't understand the specific or general principles. Other folks will insist that it's a terrible idea to hand over the comprehension of medical treatments to LLMs, because in the long term it will leave us helpless and dependent.
Humans were curious and started the intelligence / learning explosion much much before money and degrees were invented.
We got to 80 without inventing money. Living that long back then was hard work every day.
Then the industrial revolution happened, and we got state pensions at one end of life and extended childhood a few years past adolescence on the other. We currently pay for this… by taxes funding both education and a pension.
Absent the radical transformations of an AI driven economy, we live 200 years in exactly the same way.
With those transformations, all bets are off unless they violate the laws of physics.
What is AI going to do that industrialization and automation hasn't already made the same promises for?
Life back then was a never-ending quest to make more calories, and you had to consume about 90% of what you made just to not starve (the other 10% went to the lords, the army, and very young children; though I'm oversimplifying here because farm animals also eat and you had to feed them). As total production was lower (and because "preservative" meant cats, alcohol, salt, and grain silos on mushroom-shaped pillars so rats couldn't get in, not industrial refrigeration and sodium benzoate etc.), this meant very different work schedule compare to today; but people were working at the limits of what biology would support, even if hours were fewer (no affordable artificial light to work at night) and "holy days" more plentiful… but on that front, most pop reporting on that seems to forget that today we have two-day weekends, while medieval European communities often only rested on Sunday (and even Sunday-is-rest-day was relaxed somewhat to avoid crop spoilage).
The modern equivalent would be if everyone's job was to hit the gym for 10 hours a day in summer and 4 a day in winter, and still sometimes had mandatory overtime. Some people do labour-intensive work today, but pre-industrial this would be 90%+ of the population and not by choice.
What we actually have in developed nations today, is no significant labour before 18 or over 68, only about 70% the people of working age* are in work at any given time, and the "work" is far less intensive. Less than half of us are employed today to support the whole population. I say "are employed" rather than "work" because childcare and domestic work is still work, but this too is much easier than pre-industrial life.
* "working age" means different things in different surveys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_employmen...
Industrialization increased working hours, not decreased them.
Way to misread what I wrote.
A subsidence farmer necessarily spends their lives doing as much work as they can eat food, because the energy to do the work is that food.
Their work cycle was arranged differently than ours, with harvest season being longer days because letting crops spoil in the fields meant starvation come winter, and winter hours being mostly limited by sunlight and moonlight because artificial illumination was far too expensive.
> 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
And? Those workers got those rights, past tense. The fact they got them is a big part of why less than half of the living population in OECD nations needs to work today: their efforts 200-100 years ago are why it is taxes paying for schools and pensions, not the largesse of lords limited to almshouses.
If we suddenly get an anti-aging treatment that has us all live 200 years*, all the governments can trivially handle this just by adjusting pension ages.
* somehow without any of the other things implied by the tech that can make such treatments; add those things in and you have to ask "why only 200?" and "what else can this tech do?" and this is all about AI having been a big contributor to some bio research, so there's a lot of "what else" already and we don't even have the anti-aging treatment yet.
Heating can be done in a few weeks even with handsaws and an axe. A chainsaw makes it faster.
If 12th century peasants had to work anything like a modern work schedule, how would people a 1000 years or more before then survive at all with less technology, tools, and knowledge? How would clothing exist at all without a loom? How did ancient people have any time for discovery and innovation at all if their lives were nearly so grueling.
Those workers rights activists didn't get all that they asked for. And why has it not gotten even better with another 100 years of productivity increases after that?
To me your explainations seem like repeates of what robber barons claimed. The luddites didn't form because people thought industrialisation was allowing them to work less than those before them.
That's a big assumption to make, so I hope you at least have some proof to back it up.
We still need post docs. What will change is their specializations.
That's why nobody writes their paper on gravity or polio in 2026.