--- title: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees. AI... description: Past tech revolutions — PCs, email, smartphones — sped up work but mostly benefited companies by piling more tasks onto employees. AI could break this pattern... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/most-tech-revolutions-made-work-worse-for-employees-ai-could-be-the-exception-this-that-wuodlsdeg twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees. AI could be the exception: this+that | daily.dev og:description: Past tech revolutions — PCs, email, smartphones — sped up work but mostly benefited companies by piling more tasks onto employees. AI could break this pattern... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/most-tech-revolutions-made-work-worse-for-employees-ai-could-be-the-exception-this-that-wuodlsdeg og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/wuodlSdeG.png og:image:alt: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees. AI could be the exception: this+that og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees. AI could be the exception: this+that **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Past tech revolutions — PCs, email, smartphones — sped up work but mostly benefited companies by piling more tasks onto employees. AI could break this pattern because it doesn't just accelerate work; it actually does some of the work itself, including the net-new tasks created by faster workflows. McKinsey projects AI will return roughly 30% of knowledge workers' time (about 2.5 hours/day) by 2030. Rather than filling that time with more output, the author argues companies will redirect it toward creativity, collaboration, and quality improvement — drawing a parallel to desktop publishing in the 1990s, which raised the quality bar for design rather than simply eliminating jobs. The key question is whether organizations reclaim that saved time for human-centered work or reflexively pile on more tasks. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 80 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-05). **TL;DR:** Commenters largely reject the post's framing, arguing that past tech revolutions did not consistently worsen conditions and that the real determinants of worker outcomes are bargaining power, institutions, and policy — not technology itself. Skepticism runs high that AI will be any different. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 30% mixed · 55% skeptical **The case for** - Some commenters note that technology has genuinely reduced physical danger and toil (e.g., mining, agriculture), making certain jobs objectively less brutal. - A few point out that AI could help skilled developers offload low-value repetitive work, freeing them for harder, more interesting problems. **The pushback** - Many argue that whether workers share in productivity gains depends on bargaining power and institutions, not the technology itself — making optimism about AI unwarranted without structural change. - Commenters highlight that improvements in working conditions happened despite technological change, driven by labor movements and regulation, not because of it. - Several note that macro-level improvements obscure severe intra-generational suffering during transitions, which is cold comfort to those living through disruption. - Housing costs and stagnant real wages since the 1970s are cited as evidence that productivity gains have not translated into better lives for most workers. - One commenter references a Norbert Wiener observation that such machines reduce the number of top-tier workers needed while dramatically increasing demands on those who remain. - Practical frustrations with AI-driven tooling (e.g., degraded customer-service bots, bloated software) suggest the quality-of-work improvement narrative is already failing in practice. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): The thread is dominated by skepticism toward both the post's historical premise and its AI optimism, with heated side debates about wages, housing, labor history, and whether past tech gains ever reliably reached workers. **Hottest debate:** Whether working conditions and wages have genuinely and consistently improved over the past 200 years, or whether macro-level gains mask severe generational suffering and stagnating real wages. **Open questions** - Will organizations actually redirect AI-freed time toward human-centered work, or will competitive pressure simply raise output expectations again? - What structural conditions — labor law, bargaining power, regulation — would need to exist for workers to capture AI productivity gains rather than shareholders? - Does 'total employee compensation' (including benefits) tell a meaningfully different story than hourly wages when assessing whether workers are better off? **Highlights** > You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they only sorta sometimes were able to retrain for the new jobs, and the working conditions in those new jobs were atrocious, exactly because they were new enough that we didn't yet have safety regulations for them. It was only their children who eventually saw any improvement in working/living conditions, and it was only because of all the absolutely awful things that happened to their parents. Safety regulations are written in blood. It only looks like consistent improvement if you zoom out to a level that obscures intra-generation experiences. At the level of the actual human beings subjected to the turbulence, it was awful. > — [heylook on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176548) > I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions. > — [siavosh on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176211) > A comment by Norbert Wiener on translation machines (published 1993 but written somewhat earlier in "Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas"): "Thus the effect of the machine of this sort in intellectual work may be to decrease the number of first class brains needed but to increase, and greatly increase, the demands made on these brains." > — [paulfharrison on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176557) > I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up. Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs. And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless. > — [bunderbunder on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176615) > The expectation is always that employees will do more for less. Employees are considered a cost, while their productive value is considered an entitlement, so the economics always push for cost reduction. In practice businesses above a certain size accrete layers of make-work and bureaucracy, which is how you end up with "It takes three weeks to change a button" friction. AI will make it easier to change the button, but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it. > — [TheOtherHobbes on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176191) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170076) · 96 points · 80 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [AI is saving workers hours a week. Most of it is being thrown away](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-saving-workers-hours-a-week-most-of-it-is-being-thrown-away-hzkmutytr) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#automation](https://daily.dev/tags/automation), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#future-of-work](https://daily.dev/tags/future-of-work) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/most-tech-revolutions-made-work-worse-for-employees-ai-could-be-the-exception-this-that-wuodlsdeg) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees. 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