[AI Survival Diary #28] Why Did the Industrial Revolution Abandon the Mass Unemployed? Could We End Up the Same Way in the AI Era?
AI Survival Diary Series | #28
Why did the Industrial Revolution abandon the mass unemployed? Could we end up the same way in the AI era?
AI experts explain the technology.
Sociologists talk about the social changes AI will bring.
But in the end, there was really only one thing I wanted to know.
Will I actually be able to keep my job?
Instead of unemployment, is it possible for everyone to just work a little less?
Following that question, I kept running into the same reference point: the Industrial Revolution.
As we saw in post #27, jobs actually increased in the early Industrial Revolution.
But the moment machines started replacing people instead of helping them, everything changed.
Fewer than 5% of workers made it into the new factories. The rest were mostly left behind.
Some held on even as wages were cut in half. Some ended up in the workhouse. Some left the country. Some simply vanished from the historical record.
A thought crossed my mind.
Once physical AI takes hold, could we end up the same way?
Could we become, like they were, people nobody needs anymore?
So this time, I wanted to find the reason — why ordinary people in the Industrial Revolution were pushed into such a miserable situation in the first place.
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1. Why couldn't workers do anything about it?
At first I assumed it was simply because workers had no power.
But the more I dug, the worse it looked.
Unions were effectively illegal.
The right to vote barely existed. At the time, suffrage was limited to men who owned a certain amount of land or property — only about 3–5% of the entire population. Factory workers, women, and the poor had no say whatsoever in the direction of the country.
The press mostly carried the voice of the government and the wealthy. Even when people were wronged, there was almost no way for that grievance to reach the rest of society.
And yet something still didn't add up. Lack of power alone doesn't explain why they were so easily discarded.
2. Why didn't the government protect the workers?
The government was actually what confused me the most. If it had stepped in even a little, I thought, so many people wouldn't have been pushed aside so completely.
But the record showed the opposite. Instead of protecting workers, the government sent in the army to put down protests.
Why?
Britain was at war with France at the time. Industrial output was national power. If the factories stopped, that wasn't seen as a labor problem — it was seen as the nation growing weaker.
So the government protected industry before it protected workers.
Still, the same question stayed with me: why could workers be pushed aside so easily?
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3. And then I finally found the reason
The more I read, the more I realized the most shocking part wasn't that the government ignored workers.
It was that the government never saw them as people it was obligated to protect in the first place.
That's the moment I finally understood why the Industrial Revolution was so brutal.
Workers of that era were not citizens the state considered itself obligated to protect.
That doesn't mean they weren't legally people. It means the state didn't see them as a priority for protection.
Suffrage belonged only to propertied men. What the state looked out for first wasn't the ordinary worker, but whoever controlled the means of production — the landowner in feudal times, the factory owner in the industrial era.
Business wasn't so different. British companies at the time looked past domestic workers toward overseas markets. Even as workers at home grew poorer, the colonies and export markets kept buying.
On top of that, people who'd lost their livelihoods in the countryside kept flooding into the cities. Outside every factory gate, men, women, and children were all lining up for work. If one person left, another was already waiting to take their place.
THE GOVERNMENT'S CALCULATION
The state protected whoever controlled the means of production — the landlord in feudal times, the factory owner in the industrial era.
THE COMPANY'S CALCULATION
Overseas and colonial markets mattered more than domestic workers. And with rural labor endlessly flowing in, one departing worker was instantly replaced.
The state had no reason to see workers as citizens worth protecting. Companies had no reason to see them as customers worth keeping. They were labor, replaceable at any moment.
The Industrial Revolution didn't abandon people.
It simply happened in an era that had no reason to protect them.
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4. But the AI era looks a little different
I don't want to claim that companies have become kinder, or that governments have become more just. I don't want to predict the future based on morality like that.
Companies still put survival first. So do governments.
So I chose to trust structure over morality.
And right now, that structure itself has changed.
Today's worker is a worker, but also a citizen. If unemployment rises, the government loses public support.
Today's worker is also a crucial consumer for business. Production can keep going. But if consumers disappear, the companies that depend on them start to shake too.
That's probably why, just as AI is taking off, conversations about universal basic income, retraining, shorter working hours, and robot taxes are already happening simultaneously all over the world.
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So, what does this tell us?
Post #27 looked at what the Industrial Revolution actually produced.
This time, I looked at why it produced that result.
First I suspected the workers. Then the government. Then the companies.
But following it all the way through, the biggest difference between then and now wasn't technology.
It was how people were seen.
| Industrial Revolution | AI Era | |
| The worker's position | A cost | A cost, and a market |
| To government | No votes to worry about | Must win back citizens' support |
| To business | Replaceable with overseas markets | Losing consumers means losing the market |
Back then, people were counted as a cost.
Now, people are a cost — and a market at the same time.
During the Industrial Revolution, governments and businesses could survive perfectly well without protecting workers.
Not anymore. If people's lives fall apart, governments have to win their support back at the ballot box. If consumers disappear, businesses lose the market that depends on them.
The Industrial Revolution was an era with no reason to protect people.
Now, protecting people is becoming tied to the survival of governments and businesses themselves.
But,
even if there's now a structural reason to protect ordinary citizens, that alone is too early to call the AI era a good outcome.
Universal basic income, retraining, shorter working hours, robot taxes — all the ideas being discussed right now still have to become actual law before we can really relax.
So in the next post, I want to look at exactly how far that legislation has actually gotten — in the U.S., in Europe, and in Korea.
