This actually is the case. See Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm. I saw this argument featured in a video by "Our Changing Climate" that I can't seem to locate now. But I believe this book was the main source for the video. Coal never actually dropped in price during the industrial revolution. The new tech was just used to expand production. And it makes sense when you consider that for these industrialists, labor and equipment costs were probably a much bigger part of their budget than the bill from their coal supplier. Even today, with all our automation, labor remains the biggest expense of most businesses. And it's not like they just ran out of water mill capacity. They were still building dams in the UK well into the twentieth century. And ultimately, cheap urban labor combined with expensive coal power beat out expensive rural labor combined with cheap water power.

Exactly. Supermarkets themselves represented a vast shift of work from the grocers to the customers. First they got us to collect our own orders. Then they figured out how to get us to run the check out!

Did you know that during the 18th and 19th century industrial revolution in Britain, coal never became cheaper than water power? All those new steam engines were used to make deeper mines more viable and to increase production. But water power remained cheaper throughout. But water power came with a downside. Available water power tended to be located in rural areas. The smaller population in these small towns consequently had a lot of labor bargaining power. Industrialists instead wanted access to the labor markets of the major cities, cities brimming over with new urban poor desperate for any scrap of work they could get. Cheaper labor overcame cheaper power. A coal plant could be put anywhere, while a water mill could only be positioned on high-flowing streams.

Renewables are cheaper, but we've been here before. There's more to this than just energy cost.

Wait til you learn how grocery stores used to be physically arranged...

Irrelevant.

We're not talking about hypothetical socialist utopias. This entire conversation is about labor law in our existing economy and system. Derailing the conversation isn't productive.

Exactly. We are beings of atoms and matter. If you want to believe in some immaterial soul, fine. But if you're a materialist, then everything we are is atoms. We know atoms in one configuration can produce true intelligence. And there are likely many possible arrangements of atoms that can reproduce this effect. And since artificial minds are not subject to most of the constraints of biological minds, an artificial superhuman intelligence should be possible. Hell, even if biology was the only way to make it possible, you could always build an artificial biological brain and just make it a lot bigger than a human one. Even if human neurology really is the limit of what this universe allows for in terms of intelligence, we could best it by just making a bigger one.

Driving employers out is fine. We have enough minerals, oil, and farm land that they aren’t needed.

You have no idea how the civilization your rely on to keep breathing actually functions.

I don't think you have any understanding of how labor law works. Even adopting very pro-worker legislation requires coordinating with companies. Otherwise you end up with a system that does nothing for workers at best or just drives every employer out of business at worst. There's certainly more room to shift compensation from owners and executives to the actual workers. But companies aren't magic infinite money trees. If you write even well-intentioned workers rights laws, but you completely ignore the actual workings of companies, you end up with a disaster.

Consider the example of pregnancy employment protection. You want to help working mothers out, and you want to pass a law requiring employers to offer so many months of paid maternity leave, and similarly paid paternity leave.

If you look into the legal language of these laws, they always have limits on which employers they apply to. And one of those limitations is company size. Imagine you operate a small shop or business. You're a sole proprietor for years. Eventually things grow enough that you can take on an employee. You're probably not going to be in a position to be able to afford to pay maternity or paternity leave. Your operation is just too small. You just don't have the resources to pay people to not work. That one person going on leave represents you losing half of your capacity. If they pass a law requiring you to anyway, all that will mean is that you have to close up shop. No one actually benefits. The new parent you would have hired doesn't get a job at all. The community loses a small locally owned business. Everyone is worse off. More business shifts to the megacorps.

Now if you're operating a hundred-person company? You can afford to offer parental leave. You have enough resources. That one person going on leave means you lose just 1% of your capacity. That's perfectly manageable.

Different jurisdictions and laws set the threshold at different numbers of employees. But they all set it somewhere. And to calibrate that number requires coordinating with employers. When writing such legislation, you have to strike a fine balance between helping as many workers as you can without driving the very businesses they rely on out of business.

And this is just one example. There is no such thing as a policy that only concerns workers, not employers. Even if you don't care at all about the employers, at a minimum you need to make sure businesses stay viable. All labor labor law, even extremely pro-worker law, needs to have employers at the table as a kind of sanity check.

The only thing that worries me is that we don't actually know how the human brain works. There's an entire school of psychological theory and practice - really its oldest truly scientific branch, that holds that human intelligence actually does work a lot like an LLM. The hard core behaviorists believed that literally all human behavior was just a really complex version of Pavlov's dogs. It sounds absurd, but they had good arguments. In principle even very complex behaviors can be the result of reinforcement and conditioning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

The 25% more figure includes all of these things. How else do you think they would make the comparison?

IDK. I get really uneasy about claims that a computer or AI can never be intelligent or self-aware. Sure, it's "just" circuits, but your brain is "just" cells passing information between each other. An individual cell is no more intelligent or self-aware than an individual transistor is. It's deeply unscientific to believe there is some magic voodoo involved in biology that can't be reproduced in a machine.

Eh. It's par for the course. 20 years ago, at the height of the frenzy of outsourcing things to China, I remember saying that this will just result in US companies creating their own competition. Anyone with a brain could see that Chinese companies weren't going to be willing to serve as second-fiddle to their US masters. The idea that you could keep design and management, while sending production overseas, and that you can keep that arrangement stable long-term? Pure fantasy. Of course a country isn't going to be content just doing the grunt work. They want the highly paying design and management jobs, not just the menial labor ones.