So you are scared of being trapped in the permanent underclass

We petition no more, that won't do, fighting must... We are determined to break every shearing frame that is hurtful to the Commonality... We will never lay down our arms until the House of Commons passes an Act to put down all machinery hurtful to the Commonality and repeal the Act to hang frame breakers.

Writings of the Luddites, page 89

What's going to happen next?

You can either look for the answer, or assume things are going to be "business as usual". It is business as usual for the people who are at the center of change, but for the rest it really is "You can't wake up someone pretend to be asleep.".

Friends inside frontier labs talk as if this could be their last job. Friends outside frontier labs and hyperscalers ask a different question: are people going to be trapped inside a permanent underclass?

This is what an industrial revolution feels like. It starts from the center of the revolution, then expands quickly. People at the center feel it first. Everyone else feels confused, then angry, then late.

Writings of the Luddites documented this during the first industrial revolution. Skilled textile workers in early nineteenth century England opposed automation because they believed machinery would make their labor obsolete and devalue their trades. Millions of British urban workers organised movements for political representation and the right to vote. They did not want to be left behind as a permanent underclass.

It took roughly 80 years for the first industrial revolution to reach its peak. Britain was the birthplace and global center. The revolution began around 1760, then spread across Europe and the United States by around 1840. By the early nineteenth century, British manufactured goods dominated global trade and Manchester became the blueprint for modern industrialisation. The wealth gap was stark enough that the fear of a permanent trap felt plausible to laborers.

In the end, the fear was not exactly wrong, but it was not the full story either. The transition was brutal and highly exploitative. Still, the predicted permanent underclass did not materialise in the sealed way workers feared, because living standards rose, labor unions formed, and the modern welfare state helped spread some of the economic benefits.

It was also possible to rise during or after the boom. Barney Barnato, cofounder of De Beers Diamond Group, and Sir Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace, are examples. Paxton was a gardener. They came from ordinary or low income backgrounds and became known for taste, timing, and the ability to see problems before others did.

The second industrial revolution was centered in the US and Germany, shifting the global economic balance away from Great Britain. It ran from roughly 1870 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and enabled true mass production through electricity.

The same technological anxiety appeared again. The rapid shift toward machine driven automation and corporate monopolies triggered severe social and economic anxieties, because factory work was broken down into repetitive tasks and companies no longer needed to pay premiums for skilled craftsmen.

While "Robber Barons" accumulated immense fortunes, the widespread fear was that capital would permanently enslave labor. Machines replaced human skills. Older and middle skilled workers were pushed into a fiercely competitive market for low wage physical labor. As middle skilled jobs vanished, workers were forced to make a choice: move up into growing sectors, or move down into lower paid work.

In contrast, younger workers had less investment in the old manual skills. They were more likely to move into occupations shaped by new automation technologies, being highly flexible and mobile.

That is where a lot of the new fortunes came from. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company at age 31 in 1870, and it later controlled 90% of US oil refining capacity. Thomas Edison, once a telegraph operator, founded what became General Electric. Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher for the deaf who obsessed over how sound travels, founded Bell Telephone Company, which later grew into AT&T. They were not protecting the old world. They were building inside the new one.

The third industrial revolution was built on digital electronics, personal computing, and global information networks. It began in the middle of the twentieth century and carried into the early 2000s, culminating in the internet boom. What followed is the world we already know: Netscape, search engines, ecommerce, social networks, delivery platforms, and the rest...we already know.

For us today, the center starts from San Francisco and the people who work closely with frontier models to build automation. Even the people building on top of frontier models, the new refineries of this age, are scared of the change. If they are scared, how should the rest of the world feel?

I don't think history has changed that much, except the timeline gets blurry while we are at the cusp of it, and information spread faster than it used to be. The rest of the gap is realisation, and situational awareness. Humans were always scared of becoming the permanent underclass when wealth gathered quickly, when work suddenly became exploitative, and when old skills lost their price.

The real question is not whether the fear is rational. It is. The question is whether you can get close enough to the new productive frontier while it is still forming. The world rewards obsessions and people who relentlessly, aggressively seeks truth.

Now..."don't write blog, build the code, get it to work, otherwise you are missing knowledge" (thanks Andrej).