If this automated future automates the process of dismissing popups as are employed by this site, I'll welcome it.
Something like 5 popups, including hijacking the back button.
Edit: I know ubo exists. This is more a point about this site throwing rocks in glass houses. AI may be one source of our dystopian future, but it is not the only one. This is pollution of the commons that is the open web just as much as (AI) SEO spam is. Have some self awareness for god's sake.
It takes two to tango. 1. The site operator makes choices. 2. The web user makes choices. (The so-called "tech" companies try to remove the likelihood/ability of the web user to make choices.)
As a web user, I choose a browser that has no Javascript engine. Nor does it auto-load resources. Yet I read the full article and saw no popups. The website operator has provided detailed "alt" descriptions for each image.1 The 1.2 MiB statically-compiled browser I'm using does not come from a so-called "tech" company or any of their business partners (Mozilla == Google business partner). As such, no need for uBO.
If one takes a position that no web user should change their choices, then IMHO this detracts from any pleas to website operators to change their choices.
Further, if one argues against web users changing their choices, e.g., a commenter suggests that all web users should always auto-load all resources in a web page and run all Javascript, then this only provides more incentive for website operators to include lots of commercially-oriented garbage in their pages.
Truthfully, there is no need to use AI to avoid popups. There are simpler solutions.
1. If for some reason I want to look at the cartoons I can download each image with a single keystroke and view them without using any Javascript.
To read the "alt" descriptions, text-only, no Javascript, no popups, without a browser:
It says "art theft", but right in the panels before you have "allow unrestricted access". Well, if you allowed it, it surely can't be theft.
IMO, a big problem on pressing on the theft and copyright angles is that they're trivially, trivially circumvented. Because there exists the public domain, permissive licensing, and permissions. And once enough permission for enough content has been obtained, that's it. Digital content rarely goes away, we have high quality data already, and if it works fine now, tomorrow it'll surely work better.
I believe fighting against AI by means of copyright is a dead-end and short-sighted tactic, because it will unavoidably lead to creating models that are 100% legal anyway. First of all from companies like Meta, Microsoft and Google that are big enough to collect the data.
Trying to sabotage it is unlikely to work great either. We're talking about computers here, which excel in the mass processing of data. Any transformation is likely detectable, possible to work around, and won't impact already existing content.
> It says "art theft", but right in the panels before you have "allow unrestricted access". Well, if you allowed it, it surely can't be theft.
Those are two different things it's talking about. AI headshot-type stuff with the permission of the person whose headshot is being made vs generally the scraping of source data to build the models.
Explain why we should not therefore allow and even encourage students to copy their homework, research projects, and exam answers from one another, or from their instructor's grading key.
While we're at it, let's force companies to share all of their internal research and content with each other, so that in the very best of scenarios everything turns into a giant bureaucratic monoculture as organizations optimize for least friction of copying data, and the lowest common denominator solutions compatible with that goal. Do the same for authors and composers and nuclear weapon designers.
The value of individual contribution immediately becomes worth exactly what was paid for it.
A world that functions according to a rule that all individual knowledge work is worth zero compensation cannot exist except as a parasite on the back of one that rejects this premise.
This does not excuse the opposite abuse, of charging rent purely to distribute gatekept data without contributing anything of special value to it.
Students do homework for learning purposes, not because they are producing anything valuable.
Copying something (eg. a movie) is a different issue from copying something and lying about it being your own work.
I'd celebrate if we ever reach the point were we are in a post-scarcity world for physical goods. But we are already there for intellectual "property" and it's being ruined by lawyers and bureaucrats.
I do think the paradigm of intellectual property is fundamentally broken, but you can't claim we're post-scarcity for knowledge when vast swaths of the economy are knowledge work and economic viability is still a requirement to live
I don't even think you can have "post-scarcity" dynamics in a piecemeal manner like this, because any erosion of scarcity is an erosion of value in an environment that is ruled by economic paradigms that equate the two
It's not weird. One of them is piracy to play games, watch movies, and post throwaway memes. The other is for training generative models that directly compete with the creators of the pirated works and drop the value of human creative skills to zero. The actual act of piracy is small compared to attempting to devalue and commodify our most human characteristics and abilities.
AI is very good at low effort content. But that's not really competitive in the professional market. There it's just a nice tool that still needs an user with artistic skills.
AI competitiveness depends very strongly on whether AI will get better at creating coherent and usable video/audio/images, or not. The better it gets, and the more amenable to user control it gets in the fine details, the more it will displace actual artists.
And I don't know the answer to that because it's not clear what the limits are on current techniques or whether anyone's working on something that would transcend the current techniques. I agree that current techs are not really suitable for high-value content without human followup; SORA might be lauded but it still does not understand what a human body is and will happily give it a random number of limbs in various stages of simultaneous movement.
(But, for the legal issues, I believe intent to compete is enough and not just actual competitiveness. E.g. fanfic is not actually legal unless clearly a parody or meta-commentary or the like, but it's ignored because it doesn't directly do anything negative to the media market.)
Nonviolence is the first step because the Unabomber route doesn't work, no matter how insightful about the long-term shift reducing demand for human labor and falling wages captured by an ever-shrinking few capital owners who will ultimately become trillionaires while millions/billions of people live in favelas or become homeless.
That's not necessarily true. There is something to be said for hand crafted goods. A machine can make me a TV dinner, but it's not the same as what mom used to make. Besides food, furniture, art, leather goods, hand blown glass, and custom made suits also come to mind as things that are possible to be made by machines, but are nicer when humans make them.
We are also at the point where autonomous AI-powered drones can conduct warfare. I'm not quite sure that completely removing humans from war is a good thing either.
You are welcome to buy hand-crafted goods if you want to. You can still buy handmade pottery even though perfectly serviceable factory pottery is widely available.
But it should be up to the consumer; the artisan shouldn't be able to ban machine-made goods to protect their livelihood.
Where do you base your argument that the consumer should be the one to choose? For many generations, you didn’t have a dozen choices for what bowl to buy, you just bought the bowls available. Why today do we defer to the consumer, whose only role is to give money to use something another has made? Why aren’t we caring more about the workers and artisans who rely on their product sales to survive? Instead we allow large capital holders to build methods to undercut the artisans and in the process they usually make a worse product and ruin the environment somehow.
Because we are all the consumer. The point of doing work is to be able to consume other people's work.
The total amount of things that can be done is desperately finite, but the amount that could be done is infinite. If a worker is making pottery by hand, they aren't doing something more valuable with their time.
The problem isn't the machine, it's the economic system that allows some dude to capture and hoard the surplus produced by replacing the human with the machine.
The machine and the operator are a superorganism system. Looking to place blame on one or a nebulous external cause is intellectually and morally dishonest because it denies culpability for specific instances of harm.
'Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.'
Hence... 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.'
For most things I think we can agree. The problem is when machines can 'think'. How much should we offload thinking to the machines.
Two big breakthroughs were needed to create organizations bigger than one person could own and run - the corporation, and the org chart.
Daniel McCallum invented modern business organization in 1854. [1] He ran a railroad. The railroad became big enough that one person couldn't keep track of everything that was going on.
A railroad has to have tight coordination, or it won't work. There are many things happening at different locations which depend on things happening at other locations. Some things had to coordinated on a scale of minutes, some on a scale of hours, days, or weeks.
A railroad needed a distributed system which could, in a sense, think.
This was a new problem. Before that, there were few inter-city organizations, and the ones that existed, such as post offices, governments, and shipping lines, were very loosely coupled.
Each location had a boss, who was mostly autonomous. That didn't work for railroads. Unlike ships, the moving trains are totally dependent on a fixed infrastructure.
Different people deal with the rolling stock, the track, the freight, and the passengers.
McCallum figured out how to make that work.
McCallum came up with daily, weekly, and monthly reports, exception reporting, and line and staff management. This made it possible for ordinary people to do something no one person could comprehend in totality. Most organizations still follow his general approach.
That was the point at which the organization became bigger than any one person.
We're not there yet with AI. Coordinating large numbers of AIs is an unsolved problem.
What I think might happen is people will say "wow ML is just like the human mind", and extrapolate from there that people who aren't special boys like them are just NPCs and don't have as many human rights.
There have always been people who have thought themselves better or more worthy than those they felt were beneath them, and there always will be. The solution is not allowing any one person to collect more resources or power than the rest. We’re failing there.
> The solution is not allowing any one person to collect more resources or power than the rest.
How are you going to "not allow" them? By being more powerful. "No it'll be a committee of shared power all the way up." You'll end up with Stalin, one of the most powerful single humans the world has ever seen.
Tonedeaf "logic". Destroying incomes harms most people while disproportionately benefiting only a few. This decreases wages and increases competition for an ever shrinking pool of jobs. Eventually, there will only be shit jobs paying peanuts that are too expensive to automate.
There is no ever shrinking pool of jobs, and real wages today are 10x higher than prior to automation.
Instead, we do more with the same number of people, and invent new jobs that didn't exist prior to automation. Like Youtube star or computer programmer.
I was persuaded by this argument for most tech, but AI researchers really, really want to make humans obsolete.
I'm reminded of the God of the Gaps argument - if you prove a supreme being exists by the existence of phenomena we can't explain, then that supreme being's space to exist is ever-shrinking as we explain more and more natural phenomena.
I think your argument is a kind of employment-of-the-gaps, but AI doesn't have to stop short of human capability, so there's no reason to think the gap won't completely close.
The only situation where there would be no jobs is if all of your needs are met by machine. If the machines are not doing everything for us - then there will still be things for people to do.
> We could automate menial jobs so people have time to make art and music but apparently we'd rather automate art and music so people have time for menial jobs
> Unexpected item in the bagging area
It's almost as if the menial jobs are the hardest ones to automate eh?
It's been proven again and again that what's second nature to us is impossibly hard for computers and vice versa. We can't math, we can't remember things reliably, the average person can't do art very well and most of us suck as writers too. The more effort something takes for us to learn the more we appreciate it as a society, but unfortunately those are the easiest pickings for automation because we have already worked out the entire process of learning it logically and not by intuition.
> Nobody digs ditches or chops down trees by hand anymore.
I do. I literally cleared out a drainage ditch and chopped wood for my
neighbour last week. I did it to keep fit, feel good and get out of
the computer room for a while.
A person using an excavator to dig a ditch and a feller buncher to chop down trees is not true automation imo, it's just using a bigger stick to do more. The worker is still there doing the job, they're not at home painting a canvas.
Big shame that the tragic death caused by the wanton disregard for safety by the swashbuckling Uber ATG (now defunct) continues to damage the safety-focused and incredibly cautious Waymo even today. This comic is one of many that can't distinguish between different self driving car companies and depicts a Waymo despite the caption being about Uber.
I for one look forward to when humans no longer need to kill each other with cars. Tens of thousands of people die in car accidents every year and Waymo is demonstrably vastly safer. Of course, non-automobile means of transportation, like trains and buses, are even more welcome in addition to self driving cars.
Understood properly, Luddites are an early precursor to what would become the labor movement later in the century, as well as the broader philosophical school of personalism that congealed around the same timeframe. All together they were (and are) voices dissatisfied with the injustices and dehumanization of both unchecked capitalism and socialism both. A central idea is the basic fact that, quoting William Morris, “Nothing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.”
Or more simply: people first.
There is a surprisingly rich vein of thought that relates here from the Vatican from perhaps 30 years after the Luddites, on to the present day:
... This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent "Gospel of work", showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one.
Such a concept practically does away with the very basis of the ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done. This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of the value of work is Man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose-at times a very demanding one-of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work.
(laborem execrens, 1981)
Pratchett fans may notice that personalist thinking sounds Weatherwaxian, and you'd be right!
"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know
that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including
yourself. That's what sin is."
Or from MLK:
"...to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things."
George Lukacs [0] and Erich Fromm [1] talk about (self-) reification -
in a Kantian kind of way - as turning yourself into a means instead of
an end. Self-exploitation. It's only through that eye you can fall so
low as to see yourself as inferior to a machine you built yourself.
> the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person
That's backwards. The value of work is how useful the end product is.
If neither you nor anyone else derives value from the work, it doesn't matter that it was done by a human. If you do it because you enjoy it, fine - but then it's not work, it's leisure.
Further consideration of this question should confirm our conviction of the priority of human labour over what in the course of time we have grown accustomed to calling capital. Since the concept of capital includes not only the natural resources placed at man's disposal but also the whole collection of means by which man appropriates natural resources and transforms them in accordance with his needs (and thus in a sense humanizes them), it must immediately be noted that all these means are the result of the historical heritage of human labour. All the means of production, from the most primitive to the ultramodern ones-it is man that has gradually developed them: man's experience and intellect. In this way there have appeared not only the simplest instruments for cultivating the earth but also, through adequate progress in science and technology, the more modern and complex ones: machines, factories, laboratories, and computers. Thus everything that is at the service of work, everything that in the present state of technology constitutes its ever more highly perfected "instrument", is the result of work.
That follows only if your highest vision for society is optimizing profits in a capitalist framework. That the capitalist machine is first, humans second.
I can't believe this is a full-throated, illustrated, pop-culture defense of luddism. Luddism is a caricature of an ideology, a thing you throw at opponents in debate and they are forced to deny.
You're not supposed to adopt it as your real, actual ideology lol. Is this a joke?
Guess I'll need to find some clogs, sign me up General Ludd.
"Luddites [...] protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods". 1
It's not an ideology and it's not anti-progress. Workers losing their jobs to automation was a problem then and is a problem now and we still haven't figured out a good way to deal with this problem. People are right to be concerned about the effects of automation, people are right to be upset when they lose their jobs, and masses of people losing their jobs is terrible and leads to other socio-economic issues. Dismissing those complaints and ignoring those issues because hey, who cares about people that aren't me, living where I don't, when number must go up, right? is the bad ideology here.
Replacing manual labor with automation is good, actually. Sewing machines put the weavers out of business yes, but more people get to wear shirts. I'm pro-shirts, anti-weavers.
Preventing such replacement is definitionally anti-progress
>Preventing such replacement is definitionally anti-progress
You can have automation while also ensuring that people do not lose their livelihoods. It's not anti-progress to say that automation must not come at the expense of the lives of the people it is replacing. This wilful misrepresentation of Luddites was bad then, and it's bad now.
> It's not anti-progress to say that automation must not come at the expense of the lives of the people it is replacing.
Yes it is, we shouldn't deny 10000 people shirts or cars or fresh bread to save 100 jobs, but that's almost besides the point. This piece is arguing a far more straightforward and hilarious version of Luddism than you are.
The piece argues that military drones and homeless-harassing robotics are bad not because of their nature, but because they are taking human jobs. It advocates for "restriction of automation to only the most dangerous forms of work" (hope you like churning your own butter). It is such a ridiculous piece of work that it almost seems like a false flag, a piece intentionally made to portray "moderate" luddism like the degrowth people (already extremists) seem even more insane than they already are.
>Yes it is, we shouldn't deny 10000 people shirts or cars or fresh bread to save 100 jobs
That's not what I said. I said that if we want automation, we must also have a system to keep the people it's replacing able to earn a living. That could be many things. Excess profit from automation could be paid to the people that it's replacing, and that's just the first thing that popped into my head.
> but that's almost besides the point.
The point was Luddites are not a caricature of an ideology, and their concerns and the issues they faced still exist today. We can have progress and still not mass-unemploy entire groups of people, but that comes at a cost to people in power, which is why we don't do it, and why labor movements historically have been met with violence by the state. HN is very quick to dismiss automation concerns because we're the ones building the automation, but there's no reason it won't come for us eventually, too. We're not the ones that own the factories, after all, we're just assembling them.
As for the rest, yeah it doesn't seem like the author has a good grasp on anything lol, it even says that Ned Ludd was their leader, and a real person. Way to lose credibility in a single panel. I just always have to point out that Luddites were a LABOR movement, primarily, and not an anti-progress or anti-technology movement. There is zero reason for workers to suffer as progress happens, other than greed.
You're arguing for a social safety net, that's in no way what luddism means or advocates for. This is why it is a parody.
Luddism doesn't argue for a social safety net, that people displaced by advances in automation and technology should be taken care of by the state. It argues that we shouldn't need a social safety net to take care of such laborers, because we should prevent automation from displacing them in the first place. This is exactly what the OP argues here.
Could the luddites have been satisfied by such an arrangement? Maybe, but that's not what they did. They threw clogs in the looms, and luddism as an ideology describes that mechanism and no other.
That particular nature is what makes luddism distinct from other labor movements. Luddism is not a synonym for "labor movement", it is a very specific set of prescriptions, and a laughable set of prescriptions at that.
Oh I see where the disconnect is: It was always my understanding that Luddism isn't really an ideology, it's just a name for the specific Luddite workers movement that happened in the 19th century, that colloquially came to be a term for people against progress for any reason - despite the Luddites only being against the machinery that was specifically threatening their jobs, who also sought government reform for things like workers' rights and wages. I think what you're talking about is Neo-Luddism, I at least can't find anything that gives an explanation for any kind of specific general anti-technology Luddism philosophy or ideology that the people in the 19th century followed. If I'm wrong about this then I was mistaken, but I am definitely in agreement about the Neo-Luddites or any group that is completely against technological progress.
I certainly would much rather not have to work and just let automation take care of everything, while I pursue my own projects, but I also certainly don't want to be sent to the proverbial mines because humans become more expendable than robots.
There's no distinction, besides time period and the particular piece of automation at issue. Classical luddites hated looms putting textile workers out of work and modern luddites hate calculators putting accountants out of work.
The luddites of the early 19th century didn't argue for profit sharing or a protected monopoly over the textile industry. They didn't argue for job placement or pensions.
They said the "obnoxious" and "offensive" machines needed to be destroyed. They engaged in many other, more common labor practices, but those are not distinct. What makes luddism a distinctive practice, the ideology of the 19th century luddites that separated them from their contemporaries in other industries, is machine destruction.
If neo-luddism is in anyway separated from "classical" luddism in more than time period and devices at issue it's that the neo-luddites want to destroy new technology for more diverse reasons than merely job security.
No one calls themselves neo-luddites, but the groups the label is attached to often take issue with things like GMO foods not because a disease-free tomato put them out of work, but because they have a deep personal phobia of disease-free tomatoes. So there's some evolution there maybe but not in a way that I think is worth much meditation. They're still basically irrational, anti-progress, self-serving destructive forces. In other words, a boogeyman, a joke.
> You're not supposed to adopt it as your real, actual ideology
lol. Is this a joke?
It's called "fatal strategies". See philosopher Rick Roderick [0,1] or
read the less accessible original from Jean Baudrillard [2,3]
Example (Roderick's): Coordinate to conspicuously not protest or vote
on something that is objectively outrageous. The tyrants will be
forced to stuff ballots with fake opposition so as not to make
corruption obvious. For example 100% election victory by North Korean
dictator etc.
Another example: Gay, queer culture adopting those words with pride
and wearing them as a "weaponised" badge of honour.
Embracing being a Luddite is a way to defuse and neutralise the term.
It's a bit of a "verbal judo" move.
If you call me a "Luddite" (I'm a rationally sceptical computer
scientist who thinks worship of technology is cultist) then I can
either:
- take the offence and get into a protracted argument about how the
Luddites were really this or that...
- say "Sure I am a Luddite". So what...?
The latter does a lot more subtle work against the known disingenuous
interlocutor. It reveals absurdity. It subtracts power from the
term. It asks the opponent to show she actually _knows_ what a Luddite
is.
Sure, as a debate strategy doing the "Yes" meme is interesting, but only if you mean to gain something by it.
When the Republicans call Bernie a socialist, and Bernie says, "yes, and?" that's because Bernie is a socialist, and he's defusing the nature of the charge. Socialism is a valid, defensible position. Being gay is valid. Opposing a North Korean dictatorship is valid.
If I call you a luddite, and you say "yes", then I say "great you're a crazy person, bring in the men with the white coats." You didn't win anything, luddism isn't defensible. Arguing that we should regress to a agrarian society with a "restriction of automation to only the most dangerous forms of work" isn't sane or defensible or interesting, it's just crazy person talk.
you've absolutely fallen into the hole and discredited yourself.
You've unashamedly revealed a lack of understanding and demonstrated
extraordinary inflexibility and lack of curiosity at the same time.
You've basically said "Indeed, I am a disingenuous interlocutor"
It's not interesting! If you argue I should light my pants on fire, or shoot myself out of a canon, or dunk my head in tar bucket, what am I supposed to respond with?
"That's nuts!"
It's not a lack of curiosity, the position the opponent is arguing doesn't have legs and that's readily apparent.
"Renounce your sinful ways of sewing machines and egg beaters! RETVRN TO TRADITION!"
Like, what? That doesn't deserve a dignified response, there's no argument there. If anything, engaging grants it a kind of credibility that is more harmful than just saying "Move along sweetie, leave the crazy man be".
When a machine does what a human artist does, some consider it theft, even though creativity is literally reworking past experiences (including vast amounts of copyrighted data). I have yet to understand what makes one theft and the other creativity.
I feel that the problem is not "theft" but the fear of being replaceable in the workforce.
Is the one making money the one making the art? The machine doesn’t make money, the owner of the machine does. Thus the owner is committing something closer to theft than creativity. Especially if the machine was trained on copyrighted art. This is very similar to wage theft.
Because a machine is doing it. It's an unfair competition.
Enforce that the machine can only work 8h/day, pays taxes, rent, student loans, has to spend 20 years training, can't be owned by humans...I think there would be fewer complaints.
> I feel that the problem is not "theft" but the fear of being replaceable in the workforce.
Sure that too. If you paid artists regardless of whether they do the job or a machine does it, they'd fear it less. Not zero fear because most people want their work to be useful and have a point, not just pick up a paycheck.
But also generally artists know other artists can learn from their work and they factor that into the price they charge for said work. They never expected machines would learn too - it really changes things.
Sounds like someone didn't read the article. The actual story of the Luddites is super interesting, and they were fairly successful at staving off automation of their professions, until the state violently intervened - including executing some of the organizers.
Progress is most certainly not "inevitable." It takes intelligence, creativity, and hard work to bring about. Sometimes people try to stop it for selfish reasons. Usually those people can be persuaded to back down peacefully, but sometimes they can't. In those cases, force is necessary. That's what government is for.
The trick, of course, is to come up with a government that can be trusted to put down Luddite uprisings and the like without going full Soviet with progressive-sounding concepts like central planning, gulags, and collective farms.
It all comes down to the problem of defining just what "progress" means. But in general, when a society can feed, clothe, and shelter more people with fewer resources, that's a good indication that things are moving in the right direction. And that's where technology comes in. Maybe there's a better way forward, but the Luddites were sure as fuck not going to find it.
> But in general, when a society can feed, clothe, and shelter more people with fewer resources, that's a good indication that things are moving in the right direction.
What does it mean when the a society CAN feed clothe and shelter everyone with ease, but chooses not to in favour of enriching a handful of people? Because that’s the world we live in, and it’s the one the luddites tried to prevent.
While I certainly don't condone the way the English state put down the Luddites, if it had not, it's quite possible that England would not have led the way in industrialization. And that spurred other nations to push too or be left behind. England changed radically during the 1800's as they pushed the industrial envelope.
This is a bit of a misconception. The Luddites were not anti-technology, they were a workers rights movement. Many of them were machine operators who smashed machines to protest for better working conditions, pay, and apprenticeships.
> Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them.
[edit] > One technology the Luddites commonly attacked was the stocking frame, a knitting machine first developed more than 200 years earlier by an Englishman named William Lee.
I'm surprised this article continues to play into these misconceptions. [1]
The government violently quashed a labor movement that chose to protest by breaking machines, not an anti-technology movement. Wasn't the first time, and certainly wasn't the last.
>Automation is not in service of the owning class, it's in service of the consumer class
The primary beneficiary is the guy that can sell 2000 shirts instead of just 100. Anything that makes it easier for you to buy shit is not for your benefit. They are hoping you buy it because they've made it so easy for you to buy it, so just buy it! And I promise you they are not forwarding any of the profits from the additional output to their remaining laborers.
I'm in the US; we're not into the whole Marxist class-struggle thing. Technically, over half of us are in the "owner class" simply by contributing to a 401(k).
One thing that people who log onto HN and advocate a class war never seem to understand is that they have far more to lose in such a "struggle" than they could ever gain. Our chains rest pretty lightly on our shoulders, all things considered.
I have never read Marx and have no opinion about his works. Doesn't change the fact that owners of capital can use automation in detriment of workers and you are splitting hairs to avoid the point: Luddites were technology users who opposed automation being used at the expense of their jobs and your oversimplification doesn't hold water.
Their main mistake was thinking that anyone else gave a hoot about their jobs. What's actually best for society? Obviously allowing the Luddites to hold the industrial revolution at bay would not have been a long-term win.
Their movement was very popular at the time, which is why it was a threat to the ruling class, which is why they executed the organizers with extreme prejudice.
You seem to be a very technically smart person. But it's not uncommon for people of high technical knowledge to assume that historical, sociological problems are ultimately technical and thus by analogy easily understood from their skill set point of view. It is also not uncommon for such people to think Luddite is a dirty word nominating ignorant laborers who tried to arrest progress.
These people are wrong. History and sociology have a lot of irreducible complexity and analogies and systematization are usually misleading. There is a lot of literature linking Luddite movements with organized and progressive labor movement. As is " What's actually best for society?"
> Luddites to hold the industrial revolution at bay
They never tried to do such a thing. Rather, they made an effort to steer it in a way that would be more socially equitable, such as advocating for better coordination and communication between management and laborers, not unlike the system Germany - a very successful and technically advanced industrial power - has in place currently. Machine destruction was a last resort sort of action with a high correlation with suppression of other outlets for industrial action, such as strict enforcement of the legislation outright banning of any workers associations.
> If you disagree, well, other sites beckon.
This is plain false dichotomy. Equating disagreeing with you with being wrong is not very conducive of an open discussion and I think this kind of posturing has not place in a forum such as this one.
Industrialization hasn't exactly been a clear win. The environmental toll is still something we're grappling with, it created a type of poverty that hadn't existed before, and it drove at least two world-scale wars. In other words: don't threaten me with a good time.
Industrialization hasn't exactly been a clear win.
The sheer privilege you're flaunting... the sheer gall. Just wow.
Do you put yourself more in the position of the machine-owner...? asks the person holding a teraflop-class computer in their hand, without a trace of irony.
I didn’t ask for the world to be organized the way it is, I just live here. Does this device make my life better? Only in the sense that it helps me navigate the world that I live in better. In another world, this device would not be helpful nor desirable.
That was the right move from the state - especially since the luddites started the violence.
Automation has made our lives so much easier and the common man so much wealthier. Imagine if we were still weaving our clothes by hand because master weavers in the 1800s were scared of losing their jobs.
Smashing machines that threaten a large group of people's way of life isn't violence that I care about. Why do you care about it? Do you put yourself more in the position of the machine-owner than the machine operator?
> Imagine if we were still weaving our clothes by hand because master weavers in the 1800s were scared of losing their jobs.
Seems like that might have been a win-win-win. We would have high quality clothing. Weavers would have a high quality of life. Fast fashion, and it's unquantifiably massive environmental impact, wouldn't exist. Where's the downside?
No, that could certainly be your takeaway, but that would tell us that you didn't actually pay attention while reviewing history and learned nothing from it.
Not only stupid; actively harmful. Luddites are selfish and short-sighted.
Imagine if we'd listened to John Henry back in the 1800s - we'd still be wasting our time digging ditches by hand. We'd never be able to build the wonders of the modern world, and we'd all be worse off as a result.
- a large slice of people oppose ANY change, no matter if positive or (obviously) negative to them;
- as a result when changes are needed or at least opportune a large slice of people hinder the change and get defeated by history, so the changes happen and tend to be favoring a small cohort while technically it can favor the entire humanity if implemented sglitly differently
- after a LARGE amount of them the happened change change a bit to mitigate favoring few since now most people have understood the good part and instead of opposing something already there and useful they push small corrections
Long story short... People MUST reason instead of being reactionary, the historic tool to make this happening was mandatory public schooling, but history prove it's not that efficient and so far we have failed to implement something better...
PS I imaging I was unable to read the entire article, even with Firefox Reader most of the content does not appear...
Something like 5 popups, including hijacking the back button.
Edit: I know ubo exists. This is more a point about this site throwing rocks in glass houses. AI may be one source of our dystopian future, but it is not the only one. This is pollution of the commons that is the open web just as much as (AI) SEO spam is. Have some self awareness for god's sake.