Name one technology that made bosses share the money

The steam engine? From 1790 to 1840, British per-capita output shot up during a technological upheaval, while working-class wages just sat there. Fifty years. Historians even gave it a name: Engels' pause. Pause. Like somebody hit a button. A kid walks into the mill at ten and he's dead before the "pause" ends.

Computers, then? Between 1979 and 2019, American productivity climbed almost 60%, while pay for the typical worker grew about 16%. Forty years of spreadsheets, email, internet, smartphones. And the paycheck? Barely twitched.

Henry Ford's famous $5 day? Cute story. Workers were fleeing his assembly line in droves, so he paid them to stay. Then he sent inspectors into their homes to check if they deserved it.

So where did the weekend come from? The eight-hour day? Strikes. Chicago, 1886, blood on the pavement. Unions. Laws dragged through parliaments by people who were sick of the bullshit. The machine made the pie bigger. Every slice was taken by force.

Now the part that scares me.

In every one of those fights, the weapon was the same. People stopped working. A strike hurts only when the factory needs you.

AI is the first technology built so the factory never needs you again.

So here's the utopia pitch: robots do the work, everyone gets abundance, UBI, free time, go paint watercolors. Lovely. Who forces it? With what leverage? You can't strike against a server farm. Every utopia brochure skips that page.