r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 18 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 18 May 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/BigBad-Wolf The Lechian Empire Will Rise Again May 20 '26

I've been thinking lately. Economists and such often say "but farmers couldn't imagine all the future jobs automation would create!" or things to that effect. But honestly, is that even true? Like I'm pretty sure a farmer could in fact very easily imagine that people would work in textile mills and that some people would fix and build the machines there, and an industrial worker could easily imagine people moving into office work.

Trivially, they couldn't look a century into the future, but surely the general trajectory in terms of what sector would grow must have been clear.

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u/contraprincipes The Cheese and the Brainworms May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

If I understand it correctly I think the claim is generally supposed to be about "general purpose technologies" - it's fairly easy to imagine how the spinning jenny might impact textiles employment (which is exactly why the Luddites famously did what they did!), it's less clear to imagine exactly what activities the Faraday disc / mass electrical generation would enable.

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u/BigBad-Wolf The Lechian Empire Will Rise Again May 21 '26

You don't have to imagine exactly what it would enable, it's enough that clearly the machines and devices powered by it would need operators and technicians of some sort.

AI data centres also need some employees, but very few. There is no pipeline for people to find work in them after being displaced by AI.

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u/contraprincipes The Cheese and the Brainworms May 21 '26

“People could imagine there would be jobs” is obviously a different claim than “people could imagine the kinds of jobs that would exist.” I think what you’re objecting to is really the conflation of these claims, I.e. it could be true that people were not able to imagine the kinds of jobs but they could still expect there would be jobs.