Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

8/4/2026 at 10:19:36 PM

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

by briga

8/4/2026 at 10:28:09 PM

> pretty consistently improved

I can accept the premise that condiitions have improved, but not that it was consistent. It seems to me that it was anything but; more like extremely spiky. great depression, postwar economic miracle. Massive labor movements rose and fell, general strikes... Plus most countries have had several wars + revolutions in the last 200 years, including two world wars. Not all of those are to do with technology, but I also dont think technology wasnt indirectly responsible for the conditions that created some of them

by RugnirViking

8/4/2026 at 10:56:22 PM

Such a good comment, I would also add how much our perception of technology lifting conditions is conflated with the increased ability of governments to steer the economy to smooth things over.

by i000

8/4/2026 at 10:36:48 PM

I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions.

by siavosh

8/4/2026 at 11:07:05 PM

Everything changed with floating currency. Inflation became a tool for centralization of ownership.

by cluckindan

8/4/2026 at 11:45:08 PM

The Robber Barons were able to r>g their empires just fine in gold-backed currency.

by smallmancontrov

8/4/2026 at 10:38:28 PM

> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years

Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.

by janalsncm

8/4/2026 at 11:05:55 PM

>to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.

Was this ever true? During the 1950s, (the perceived heyday of American middle class wealth) the female labor force participation rate was 35%[1], which was close half of the male labor force participation rate.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

by gruez

8/4/2026 at 11:33:35 PM

1) Based on your numbers, 65% of women were not working at that time.

2) That 35% number was likely even lower for married women.

3) Racism was still a systemic problem and was bad. Black men were excluded from the GI bill for example.

4) In spite of that, the median American household needed only 2x their salary to buy the median house. That number is 5x today, and after taxes the ratios are 2.2x then vs 6x today, when two adults are often working rather than one.

5) In short, Americans are working much harder today.

by janalsncm

8/4/2026 at 11:40:57 PM

Compare the median house in 1950 with one today.

by SoftTalker

8/4/2026 at 10:43:56 PM

The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this.

You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.

by VirusNewbie

8/4/2026 at 11:45:19 PM

“Upper middle class” has nothing to do with it.

In 1950, the median household could buy a house with 2 years of income. That is, 50% of households could do this.

Today, the median house costs $400k. Only the top 12-14% of households make 200k per year.

So proportionally, the % of households that have the same buying power as a median 1950s household has shrunk roughly 4x.

by janalsncm

8/4/2026 at 11:35:27 PM

The data that deflate with CPI? The metric notorious for laundering forced substitution into voluntary substitution? The American Dream is to Owner's Imputed Rent a house?

I love BLS, they do a lot of thankless work very well, but if you give someone else control of the inflation basket you are letting them pick any slope for these graphs that they want. Don't do that. It's the economic equivalent of handing your passport to an employer, talking about your net worth in public, or signing a blank check. Just don't. Yeah, we're all busy, you probably don't have time to construct a basket more sophisticated than "gold" or "housing" -- but even though those both have big problems, they still aren't as bad long-term as CPI. Or maybe you disagree and think the CPI basket and hedonic adjustment methodology compounds better for your purposes, but if so you should be able to roughly account for the dramatic difference and articulate why.

by smallmancontrov

8/4/2026 at 11:33:02 PM

2026 - 200 = 1826

Yeah no. It's only since 1950 that conditions improved for everyone. Before then everything from sewage, to coal smoke, to chronically low wages made life worse for everyone involved. The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century.

by noosphr

8/4/2026 at 11:10:03 PM

You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they only sorta sometimes were able to retrain for the new jobs, and the working conditions in those new jobs were atrocious, exactly because they were new enough that we didn't yet have safety regulations for them.

It was only their children who eventually saw any improvement in working/living conditions, and it was only because of all the absolutely awful things that happened to their parents. Safety regulations are written in blood. It only looks like consistent improvement if you zoom out to a level that obscures intra-generation experiences. At the level of the actual human beings subjected to the turbulence, it was awful.

by heylook

8/4/2026 at 11:19:53 PM

I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up.

Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs.

And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless.

by bunderbunder

8/4/2026 at 11:27:10 PM

Exactly. Workplaces became safer and more equitable to the laborers despite technological advances, not because of them.

by mplewis

8/4/2026 at 10:32:57 PM

> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years

They've improved, but not consistently on human timescales.

Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous. Things have, so far, trended better over time but they can be bad for whole generations and also past results do not guarantee future results.

> The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity.

I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".

by georgemcbay

8/4/2026 at 10:39:57 PM

> I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors".

We can and we will.

If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think.

> And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".

Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.

by palmotea

8/4/2026 at 10:42:23 PM

Labour conditions in the capitalist west 200 years ago were some of the worst in history, so it's easy to make yourself look good in comparison.

by Fricken

8/4/2026 at 10:27:32 PM

This seems obviously wrong as there are many counter examples. Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off. Mining mechanization made mines far less deadly and greatly reduced the human exertion required. I'd much rather harvest corn in an air conditioned combine vs. with an ox.

Even during the early industrial revolution, notorious for poor working conditions, people overlook why there was such high demand for those shitty jobs. The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside. A family's survival was dependent on a good harvest.

by aeternum

8/4/2026 at 11:40:15 PM

Becuase they would quit and work anywhere else after a few days.

In 1913 Ford had to hire over 52,000 workers just to maintain an active factory workforce of 14,000.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...

> The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside.

Because their land was stolen during enclosure.

by noosphr

8/4/2026 at 10:55:30 PM

During the early industrial revolution people were not starving in the countryside because of poor harvests. They were starving in the countryside because the UK at that time siezed land that was previously held in common and granted it to the nobility through the enclosure acts. Now to survive as a peasant you could not subsist off of common land, you had to pay rent to a lord and work their land, and as agricultural productivity increased through mechanization and improved farming techniques the lords only needed so many people to work. A subsistence farmer would become unable to afford rising rents, as they did not benefit from mechanization due to not having the capital to buy machines.

by Majora320

8/4/2026 at 11:30:45 PM

Yes agreed, but the net result is that living in the countryside was far from romanticized agrarian life people often picture it as. Lords owning land was a very old idea, it's a bit of a leap to say that was due to mechanization.

by aeternum

8/4/2026 at 11:25:54 PM

> Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off

I think there was something else going on that might explain that.

by BigTTYGothGF

8/4/2026 at 9:24:46 PM

This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms?

It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!

Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.

by taeric

8/4/2026 at 9:51:58 PM

The claim of the article is that expectations increase at a faster rate than the work becomes easier.

It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out.

If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no longer impressive to be able to make simple apps. You have to bring something different and better to the table. Good developers still do this on top of what AI can do by itself, but I also think there were a lot of relatively easy programming jobs where you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything. You had to know how to follow the rules, get easy tickets from the tracker, make enough changes that you could call it done, and then go on through the dog and pony show of getting the PR approved and getting those story points to count for your standup report. Repeat 5 days per week.

Every mid-size and larger company I worked for had a collection of developers like this: Not really trustworthy or skilled enough to handle big tickets, but you could assign all the loose ends and easy tickets to them. They’d get done eventually while the other devs could focus on bigger efforts.

Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around. An experienced developer can take 10 easy tickets, use their codebase knowledge to write targeted prompts with Opus or Fable, quickly review the code, and have all the easy work done in an afternoon. Then back to the hard tickets.

If you were one of those developers coasting on the easy work, this revolution probably feels like it increased expectations unfairly. If you were one of those devs doing the hard work, you have another tool to use but you’re still grinding away at the hard problems with an extra tool to make some of the parts easier.

by Aurornis

8/4/2026 at 10:34:37 PM

The expectation is always that employees will do more for less. Employees are considered a cost, while their productive value is considered an entitlement, so the economics always push for cost reduction.

In practice businesses above a certain size accrete layers of make-work and bureaucracy, which is how you end up with "It takes three weeks to change a button" friction.

AI will make it easier to change the button, but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it.

by TheOtherHobbes

8/4/2026 at 9:49:36 PM

The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.

by giaour

8/4/2026 at 10:25:52 PM

it was terrible for weavers

it was great for workers around the world who now can afford clothes

by vanuatu

8/4/2026 at 11:42:31 PM

Cheap cloth didn't mean cheap clothes. You had to wait a century for the sewing machine for that to happen.

by noosphr

8/4/2026 at 10:00:43 PM

for some lines of jobs the tooling progress might be objectively worth a lot, but then there's the less mechanical side of things, maybe teamwork, craft went down after power tools became common

something less positive i noticed, in offices, is that technology is not there to help you, management get sold something shiny to replace the old and dusty, the supplier assembles a bad team, implement crappy network, install new web stuff that is sluggish and requires new machines, and employees are left holding the bag. the new tech is often way more limited than the old junk (feature dropped, bad ergonomics for prolonged work, no more scripting options), the integrations are lacking, the people are not trained .. it's often a slow mess full of redundant steps and missed opportunities.

by agumonkey

8/4/2026 at 9:33:04 PM

Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.

by Fricken

8/4/2026 at 9:41:26 PM

> Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.

Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.

There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.

EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.

by Aurornis

8/4/2026 at 9:44:42 PM

Yet people still have to work the same number of hours each day - they are performing the same amount of labor, just in a different form.

by cosmotic

8/4/2026 at 10:05:23 PM

There’s more to labor than hours worked. Sitting at a computer for 8 hours is a different load than landscaping for 8 hours in the middle of summer.

Number of hours worked has actually been trending down for a very long time.

by Aurornis

8/4/2026 at 10:17:53 PM

Most people landscape their own yards recreationally. They do it for fun, in their free time, at their own expense.

by Fricken

8/4/2026 at 9:35:57 PM

The 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.

by tptacek

8/4/2026 at 10:22:42 PM

It was explicitly socialist in the UK.

There was a paternal element of duty-of-care-and-welfare to factory/business ownership in the UK - patchy, but very real - which flared briefly in the US but is completely absent now.

It's still present in Europe, to varying degrees.

by TheOtherHobbes

8/4/2026 at 10:31:24 PM

It was signed into law with the fair labour standards act of 1938, as part of the New Deal under FDR.

by Fricken

8/4/2026 at 11:31:48 PM

[dead]

by jreynar

8/4/2026 at 10:45:43 PM

Corey Doctorow talks about the role of technology in society as not pre-determined, and I think this is mostly right. Trends are not inevitable.

At the same time, technology makes it easier to do one thing or another. And I think that’s the right framing for new technologies like AI: what does it make it easier to do? (It might be easier to answer that question by teasing apart the different technologies lumped together as “AI”.)

by janalsncm

8/4/2026 at 11:11:21 PM

A comment by Norbert Wiener on translation machines (published 1993 but written somewhat earlier in "Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas"):

"Thus the effect of the machine of this sort in intellectual work may be to decrease the number of first class brains needed but to increase, and greatly increase, the demands made on these brains."

by paulfharrison

8/4/2026 at 9:47:08 PM

idk I'm pretty glad to not be in the coal mines

by Havoc

8/4/2026 at 10:01:17 PM

[dead]

by blpbloopcmpt

8/4/2026 at 11:21:05 PM

Correct

by tennisflyi

8/4/2026 at 10:15:32 PM

Marx actually has a bit about this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm...

The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).

by maxbendick

8/4/2026 at 11:33:14 PM

Ok but Marx is a disproven hack, whose only claim to fame is indirectly starving millions of people. Not sure his ideas deserve any more air than they have already been given. Time to move on.

by appreciatorBus

8/4/2026 at 8:52:41 PM

This one is different. It makes the quality of consumption worse too.

by dude250711

8/4/2026 at 9:00:51 PM

I personally think a good balance between tech and employees was the late 1980s.

You still had to hire people to do work and tech was good enough to help them out. As tech advanced, people started trusting what the systems said even if blatantly wrong and people started loosing work.

by jmclnx

8/4/2026 at 9:53:04 PM

Agent Smith was right when he was explaining The Matrix. Human civilization peaked in the 90's.

by ooterness

8/4/2026 at 9:06:13 PM

I'm sure forcing workers to use the chatbot that drives people to suicide is going to go great yeah.

by lowsong

8/4/2026 at 9:38:34 PM

I just tried to check if one of my 8BitDo controller buttons can be remapped to guide button and now I want to kill myself too. It’s hard for me to accept that this shit is taking peoples jobs.

by wao0uuno