> We invent machines to free ourselves from labour
That's a very romantic view.
The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.
I would hope that people realize that money in itself is merely digits on a computer and that the real power of this stuff belongs to the people since the AI inherited and learned from us.
I know that's a simplification but we uphold this contract that controls us. The people get to decide how this plays out and as much as I'm hopeful we excel into a world that is more like star trek, that skips over the ugly transition that could succeed or fail to get us there.
But we aren't that far off of a replicator if our AI models become so advanced in an atomic compute world they can rearrange atoms into new forms. It seemed fiction before but within reach of humanity should we not destroy ourselves.
Our moral and political development severely lags our technological development. I have very little confidence that it will ever catch up. Looking back over the post-WW2 era, we have seen improvements (civil rights, recognition of past injustices, expansion of medical care in many countries) but also serious systemic regressions (failure to take climate change seriously, retreat to parochial revenge-based politics, failure to adequately fund society's needs, capture of politics and law by elites).
My main concern about AI is not any kind of extinction scenario but just the basic fact that we are not prepared to address the likely externalities that result from it because we're just historically terrible at addressing externalities.
Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution, so in the long run we are slowly freeing ourselves. But in the short run, people keep working because a) machines usually are complementary to labour (there are still coal miners today, they are just way more productive) and b) even if some jobs are completely eliminated by machines (ice making, for example), that only "solves" that narrow field. The ice farmers can (and did) reenter the labour market and find something else to do.
> Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution
Although that is true when comparing the start of the Industrial revolution and now, people worked less hours before the Industrial revolution [1]. Comparing the hours of work per year in England between the 17th century and the 19th century, there has been an increase of 80%. Most interestingly, the real average weekly wages over the same time period have slightly decreased, while the GDP has increased by 50%.
No, on average people in 1600s England (who were overwhelmingly peasants) worked almost all daylight hours, 6 days a week - perhaps 3000 hours a year. It's simply not possible for the hours worked to have increased a further 80% from that baseline.
Also most labour was not wage labour in the 17th century, so you need to be careful looking at wages. Especially comparing the the 19th century since there was a vast expansion of wage labour.
Are average hours worked decreasing because we have more abundance and less need to work, or are they decreasing because the distribution of work is changing?
I find it hard to accept your claim because at the start of the industrial revolution there were far fewer women in the formal labor market than there are today.
Well there were also barely any men in the formal labour market. Most people were peasants working their family farm + sharecropping on estates of the landed gentry. But that doesn't mean they weren't working hard - both sexes worked well over 3000 hours per year, to barely scrape by.
Because we invent machines not to free ourselves from labor (inventing machines is a huge amount of labor by itself), but to overcome the greed of the workers.
