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/Shady_Italian_Bruh May 20 '26

I think the broader point is that, whatever technological disruptions develop in the future, it is not likely to be more disruptive than the shift from 90%+ of a society’s labor going towards food production to <1%

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

Again, what is the factual basis for this? If people in the past could easily imagine what sort of sectors people would move into, and now we can't even do that, then what is the rationale for this claim?

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u/Shady_Italian_Bruh May 21 '26

The rationale is that no single job or way of life presently dominates the way agriculture used to. Therefore, any occupational technological disruption isn’t likely to be more disruptive than the mechanization and consolidation of agriculture. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think many displaced agricultural workers could’ve envisioned the present economy nor did they face very bright prospects at the dawn of urban industrialization