Well yeah a lot of unemployed textile workers did go into poverty or even starve to death at the time. I've read some speculation that the first industrial revolution was a net negative on society initially, and took many decades to actually improve the average standard of living. There was a reason people gathered in mobs to break the new machines. They were hungry.
But still the industrial revolution didn't really replace laborers. The machines were still quite limited, and humans were still needed to do the jobs machines couldn't do. What's different this time, is soon the machines will be able to do everything humans can do. Or at least everything an unskilled worker can do. Operating a machine in a factory, driving a truck, entering data into a computer, making phone calls, these are all things machine learning is capable of.
Lastly look at horses. The invention of trains would seem to have competed with them and taken many of their jobs. But instead horses vastly increased, because trains couldn't do everything horses could do. Then cars were invented, and the horse population crashed over just a decade.
Why did this happen? Didn't the invention of the train prove that automation doesn't take horse jobs? Shouldn't there always be new jobs for horses? Can't horses specialize in the 1% of tasks that cars can't do, like transportation in places without roads?
But that didn't happen. The cost of just feeding the horses was much higher than the cost of buying an automobile. There were some obscure jobs for horses left, but nowhere near enough.
I think this is factually incorrect. Women used to spend the majority of their free time spinning thread and sewing clothes for their family. The average person owned three outfits total, and wore basically one outfit every single day.
The industrial revolution dramatically increased both production and consumption. We now own different outfits for every day, dozens of special occasion fashions which must be regularly replaced and updated, etc. Total production, and total wages paid by the industry has dramatically improved.
A shirt a couple hundred years ago would cost $4,500 at minimum wage to produce. But no one paid the equivalent of $4,500 for a shirt. What actually happened is a lot of the work was virtually or actually completely unpaid.
The machines drove a vast increase in productivity and GDP and provide a standard of living today which 200 years ago would have been bad science fiction. The machines drove down cost of production dramatically, increasing consumption and increasing overall employment and wages.
People didn't destroy the machines because they caused poverty, they destroyed them out of fear.
Your analogy with horses is deeply flawed. Horse used declined just like spinning wheel use declined - because they were obsolete.
The latest round of automation does not by any stretch of the imagination make humans obsolete. It will actually make humans more productive and actually more valuable.
As Steve Jobs said, computers are a bicycle for the mind. AI is a motorcycle. Get on, go faster, reach higher, achieve more, live better.
Everyone knows that in the long run the industrial revolution was a positive. But at the time, the disruption caused lots of misery. Farmers were driven from farms that had relatively good living conditions, to cities with awful working conditions, living conditions, and lower wages. Eventually things improved, but it didn't happen overnight.
What does it matter if there are more clothes, if there aren't any consumers to buy them? We are looking at a world where humans are obsolete just like horses. There is nothing an unskilled worker can do that a machine can't, at least in the near future. And many skilled workers do jobs vulnerable to automation as well. The vast majority of the human population is unnecessary, just as horses were after the invention of cars.
Do you really believe this? Horses can become obsolete because they are a domesticated animal, they are a tool. Humans are really something quite different.
It is truly an insult to humanity to think; all these people doing menial jobs which could be automated are now obsolete. That they are somehow incapable of higher thoughts and reasoning and cannot add value beyond the machines.
In fact, while certainly there is a range of inherent potential between humans, my understanding is that the nominal human capacity for creative thought is orders of magnitude beyond the point of obsolescence by any kind of "artificial intelligence" we expect to be able to create at least within the next century.
No, certainly we have not yet created anything even remotely like the machine that will be our master.
The average human, as we have asked each generation of "average" human before us, will use technology to reach farther than you can imagine they would ever be able to reach.
And also, it's worth considering, how very much we tend to under-estimate the intelligence of historical man from our lofty perch of technological superiority, just as we under-estimate our future potential.
My favorite quote from I, Robot is a man questioning the intelligence of a robot. "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" The robot replies, "Can you?"
Most humans aren't that special. Long before alphaGo beat one of the best Go players in the entire world, simple Go programs could destroy the majority of players. Sure, AI probably won't be able to do computer programming for a long time. But the average person with an IQ of 100 is not going to retrain to be a computer programmer. AI doesn't need to be as intelligent as the best humans, it just needs to be as intelligent as the average person. Probably much less than that, because the average job is boring repetitive work that doesn't necessarily require much intelligence.
I mean seriously, where do you predict all the unemployed people will go to? What jobs do you think are invulnerable to automation, and can absorb 90% of the population? What jobs have such great economic value, require lots of unskilled workers, and can't be replaced by machines?
It's actually clearly unsustainable the way we're consuming clothing and pretty much all goods, I read in s book published recently that if everyone in China purchased a new pair of wool socks tomorrow, we would be out of wool.
But still the industrial revolution didn't really replace laborers. The machines were still quite limited, and humans were still needed to do the jobs machines couldn't do. What's different this time, is soon the machines will be able to do everything humans can do. Or at least everything an unskilled worker can do. Operating a machine in a factory, driving a truck, entering data into a computer, making phone calls, these are all things machine learning is capable of.
Lastly look at horses. The invention of trains would seem to have competed with them and taken many of their jobs. But instead horses vastly increased, because trains couldn't do everything horses could do. Then cars were invented, and the horse population crashed over just a decade.
Why did this happen? Didn't the invention of the train prove that automation doesn't take horse jobs? Shouldn't there always be new jobs for horses? Can't horses specialize in the 1% of tasks that cars can't do, like transportation in places without roads?
But that didn't happen. The cost of just feeding the horses was much higher than the cost of buying an automobile. There were some obscure jobs for horses left, but nowhere near enough.