[AI Survival Diary #27] Will AI Take Our Jobs, or Just Shorten Our Hours? And What About My Paycheck?

 

AI Survival Diary Series | #27

Will AI take our jobs, or just shorten our hours? And what happens to my paycheck?

 

Every time I read about AI, I end up circling back to the same three questions.

 

Will it make us unemployed?

Or will it just shorten our working hours?

And... what happens to my paycheck?

 

I've read the books. I've watched the videos.
But every answer to these three questions felt vague at best.

 

History doesn't repeat itself exactly.
But a similar event can still hand you a workable scenario.

 

So I looked at the one period that, like AI now, saw an explosive jump in productivity: the Industrial Revolution.
I wanted to know what happened to ordinary people back then.
What happened to their jobs, their hours, their wages.

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1. Comparing the Industrial Revolution to the AI era

To predict the future from the past, you first have to know where the two don't match.
So that's where I started.

The Industrial Revolution began with machines taking over the physically hard work people used to do.
But that didn't mean people became unnecessary.
Those who left the fields moved into the factories.
Work didn't disappear so much as it relocated.

AI is different.
Office workers aren't moving to a new industry. AI is starting to do the same job, in the same seat.

Sure, AI is creating new industries too.
But it's hard to say those industries are absorbing labor at anywhere near the scale that manufacturing once absorbed agricultural workers.

Except the Industrial Revolution didn't stay the same either. Things shifted over time.

The early era, when machines were tools that helped people,
and the later era, when machines began replacing them,
were two completely different stories.

And it's that later era that starts to look uncannily like AI today.

So during that period,

Did ordinary workers, like us, worry about losing their jobs?

Or did they hope machines would shorten their hours?

Did they fear machines would cut their wages, or did they expect higher productivity to raise them?

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2. Phase One (1780–1830) — No layoffs. Something else grew instead

First, a caveat: this early phase looked quite different from what's happening with AI today.

Factories kept opening, and they kept needing more workers. England's handloom weavers alone grew from roughly 75,000 in 1795 to around 250,000 by the 1820s.

Job losses were almost nonexistent.

Working hours rose instead. Annual working hours climbed from about 2,400 to 3,500 hours. With factories running around the clock, 12-hour workdays became the norm.

Wages told a similarly grim story. Between 1780 and 1840, productivity rose 46%, while real wages crept up just 12%. Factory owners' profit margins, meanwhile, doubled.

Unlike what we're seeing with AI, the machine revolution actually created more jobs. But those machines also kept workers tethered to the factory floor for every hour the machine ran, and the wealth all that extra output generated never made it into their wages.

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But the Industrial Revolution didn't stay on this same track.

Around 1830, the mood shifted entirely.

The era of machines helping people ended, and the era of machines replacing them began.

Steam-powered looms exploded from 2,400 units in 1813 to 100,000 by 1833.

And it's from this exact moment that the Industrial Revolution starts to look strikingly like AI does now.

3. Phase Two (1820s–1860s) — Now the layoffs began

What happened next unfolded under conditions remarkably close to what we're seeing with AI today.

Job losses became real this time. The 250,000 handloom weavers dwindled to about 30,000 — roughly eight or nine out of every ten lost their livelihood.

And there was almost nowhere for them to go. As of 1820, the new power-loom factories employed roughly 10,000 people. Handloom weavers still numbered 200,000 to 250,000. Fewer than 5% of the total workforce made it into the new factories.

Working hours split completely between the two groups. Those who landed factory jobs saw their hours fall, thanks to the Factory Acts and labor organizing. Those left behind saw the opposite — working up to 15 hours a day just to make up for lost income. In the same era, one group's life got easier while the other's got harder.

Wages followed the same pattern. They started rising after 1840 — but only for that same 4–5% who'd landed the new factory jobs. For everyone else, 1824 to 1839 was a period when real wages were cut in half.

It took the Industrial Revolution 60 years to reach a point where even a small minority could say pay matched effort.

Writing this, I kept seeing our own moment overlap with theirs. Back then, only a minority made it through. Is it so strange to wonder whether, this time, only the jobs AI can't touch will be the ones left standing?

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So what actually happened to the people who lost everything?

This is what really happened to people sidelined by that explosive rise in productivity — the same kind we're seeing with AI now.

I wondered whether they could have just gone back to farming. They couldn't. Most of the common land had already been enclosed and privatized, so there was no land left to return to. The countryside itself had fewer jobs, too, thanks to its own mechanization — agricultural laborers were rioting against threshing machines in the very same years (the Swing Riots, 1830–1832). Neither the city nor the countryside had room left.

With the countryside closed off and the city pushing them out, the options left to ordinary people like us were bleak.

① They held on anyway. Even as wages fell by half, with no alternative, many simply refused to let go of the trade.

② They went to the workhouse. This was the state's last resort — and nothing like the "welfare" we picture today. Records from 1850 describe 18-hour workdays inside the workhouse itself, just to survive. One in five inmates stayed more than five years. What was meant to be temporary shelter became, in practice, a life sentence.

③ They left the country. Starting in the 1830s, Poor Law authorities and private organizations ran emigration programs, shipping the unemployed and their children off to colonies like Canada and Australia. It amounted to a policy of: if you can't make a living here, leave. I'd always thought of the "American Dream" as something romantic — researching this made me realize it wasn't, not for these people.

④ The bleakest outcome: they simply faded away. The historian E.P. Thompson argued that the handloom weaving trade didn't so much end as go extinct — no one new entered the trade, and the precarious, impoverished lives of those still in it likely shortened their lifespans. They didn't move on to new jobs. They aged, or died early, in poverty, and the profession quietly disappeared along with them.

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So, what does this tell us?

History showed one thing clearly.

It wasn't the technology itself.
It was the disorder we let stand
that pushed ordinary people out of ordinary lives.

In the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, jobs multiplied, but excessive hours and stagnant wages made life hard for workers.

And in the second phase — the one that resembles the AI era most closely — fewer than one in five workers made it into the new jobs. The rest simply held on, ended up in the workhouse, left the country, or quietly disappeared.

There's no guarantee that what happened during the Industrial Revolution will repeat with AI.

But it did show us this: whenever a gap of disorder opens up between new technology and the institutions meant to govern it, someone inevitably gets left behind.

Which brings us back to our first question: will AI take our jobs, shorten our hours, or change our paychecks?

The Industrial Revolution did answer that question eventually. But that answer was only good for a small minority.

 

AI is already cutting jobs in entry-level hiring, and — from what I'm hearing secondhand — in parts of the video production industry too. Every country is now debating how to respond.

 

Surely we won't end up like the Industrial Revolution did?

Unlike back then, policy and legislation around AI are already being discussed — "already," with a question mark still hanging over it.

 

Next time, I'll be looking into:
Which countries are moving on which laws, and how fast.
And exactly where Korea stands in that race.