How Soon Will AI Take Your Job?

"The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren't just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body-an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes-simply wasn't built to match."

"So Massachusetts created the nation's first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call "negative externalities" but were then called "children's arms torn off," policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. Or, if you're a bit more cynical, a sustainable level of exploitation."

"Measurement doesn't abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting-of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts-signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. Over time, that intention matters. It's one way a republic earns the right to be believed in. The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization."

Massachusetts reformers established the Bureau of Statistics of Labor in 1869 to count work hours, conditions, wages, and industrial harms amid the Second Industrial Revolution. New machines operated at speeds the human body could not match, creating severe safety problems and pressures toward exploitation. Measurement aimed to produce reasonably fair outcomes or, more cynically, a sustainable level of exploitation. Widespread labor conflict and violence led Congress to create a federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Measurement does not abolish injustice, but creating shared facts signals an intention to be fair and helps legitimate a republic. The BLS sends out detailed surveys to about 60,000 households.

Read at The Atlantic