It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration. You get richer as you move up in the supply chain, period. Companies vertically integrate to drive costs down in the long run.

As AI gets more prevalent, it'll drive the cost down for the companies supplying these services, so the former employees of said companies will be paid lower, or not at all.

So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? I can understand the leisure time. Because, when you don't have a job, all day is leisure time. But you'll need money for that, so will these companies fund the masses via government to provide Universal Basic Income, so these people can both live a borderline miserable life while funding these companies to suck these people more and more?

Just to clarify: the Luddites were being automated out of a job.

From what I understand of history, while industrial revolutions have generally increased living standards and employment in the long term, they have also caused massive unemployment/starvation in the short term. In the case of textile, I seem to recall that it took ~40 years for employment to return to its previous level.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm far from certain that I can survive 40 years without a job.

Leisure time hasn’t increased in the last 100 years except for the lower income class which doesn’t have steady employment. But yes, I see your point that the homeless person who might have had a home if he had a (now automated) factory job should surely feel good about having a phone that only the ultra rich had 40 years ago.

I think the backlash to this post can summarized as such:

Perhaps there is a theory in which productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone, however that is not the lived reality for most people of the working classes.

If productivity gains are indeed increasing the standards of living to everyone, it certainly does not increase evenly, and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal, while the standard of living increases for the already richest of the rich are astronomical.

> Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone

This just isn’t true, necessarily. Productivity has gone up in the US since the 80s, but wages have not. Costs have, though.

What increases standards of living for everyone is social programs like public health and education. Affordable housing and adult-education and job hunting programs.

Not the rate at which money is gathered by corporations.

Utter nonsense. Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat all of that time despite that gain.

In 2012, Musk was worth $2 billion. He’s now worth 223 times that yet the minimum wage has barely budged in the last 12 years as productivity rises.

Wealth has bled from landlords to warlords and now bleeding to techlords.

Warlords are still rich, but both money and war is flowing towards tech. You can get a piece from that pie if you're doing questionable things (adtech, targeting, data collection, brokering, etc.), but if you're a run of the mill, normal person, your circumstances are getting harder and harder, because you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.