For those who don’t know The Spinning Jenny was one of the first automated looms invented in the 1760s in England.
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Before the Spinning Jenny and other fabric-weaving advances in the Industrial Revolution, English weavers were skilled tradesmen who worked at home. The subculture of independent weavers was wiped out since women and children were hired to operate the mechanical looms at pennies per day. As the market for expensive hand-woven fabrics crashed when they were displaced by cheap machine-woven fabrics, weaver families were forced to move to the city where the factory jobs were located. There was major social dislocation and impoverishment of weaver families.
Here is a Google Gemini description:
The eventual outcome was dramatic enrichment of the factory builders (and traders who sold the vast amount of fabric manufactured by the machines) but social collapse and tragic impoverishment of the artisan weaver families who were forced to move from their rural homes to regimented factory jobs in the city.
On a Macro level the economy of England prospered due to exports. On a Micro level many suffered.
Today’s U.S. economy could very well be disrupted since many white collar jobs can be displaced by AI. Those jobs provide a substantial part of consumer spending. AI will not provide export goods to make up the loss to the economy the way the Spinning Jenny did.
Wendy
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But the basic argument that technology creates job loses is incorrect and always has been. There are winners and losers but jobs are created:
“Since the dawn of the industrial age, a recurrent fear has been that technological change will spawn mass unemployment. Neoclassical economists predicted that this would not happen, because people would find other jobs, albeit possibly after a long period of painful adjustment. By and large, that prediction has proven to be correct.”
If AI is going to replace many of the middle class that I have to deal with - mainly government and local authority workers - then bring it on.
Well, etymologies differ. In the beginning and centuries before the Industrial Revolution, a “spinster” was someone who spun thread, usually at home. (A “weaver” turned the thread into cloth.) Spinsters were both men and women at first, but the term migrated to mean “women” and eventually “unmarried woman”, as they were more available to do the spinning, the married women picking up child rearing and other household chores, and men doing more of the outside work.
A spinster worked at home, and needed a bare few resources: a wheel of some sort and some fiber to spin.
Later the term came to be perjorative, meaning an older, undesirable single woman, and lost the (obvious) meaning of “one who spun”. Men, by the time of the Industrial Revolution, had moved out of the house and into other activities, either farming or working in the emerging factories that began producing goods for the King and the wealthy, and eventually, with mass production, commoners as well.
Men, woman, and even middle-age children were “spinsters” in the beginning, at least until society changed and the meaning of the word along with it.
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