People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention. The fact that the word “Luddite” is now used as an insult, a way of calling someone irrational and ignorant, is a result of a smear campaign by the forces of capital.
Whenever anyone accuses anyone else of being a Luddite, it’s worth asking, is the person being accused actually against technology? Or are they in favor of economic justice? And is the person making the accusation actually in favor of improving people’s lives? Or are they just trying to increase the private accumulation of capital?
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Reblog got turned off on this post but I want to share it anyway.
The thing the Luddites were railing against still hasn't been solved! Like. Your boss brings in a shiny new set of tools to make your job more efficient. Okay!
Does it make your job easier? No, you're still on the clock so they'll find something else for you to do with the extra time. But how about that extra pay? It's about +$0.50 an hour. Well, okay, I guess nothing's really changed.
Oh, except now they're doing mass layoffs, since there just isn't enough demand for everybody to be working at this higher efficiency.
Luddites are often characterized as anti-technology. But in reality, they were anti-exploitation. The story of the Luddites, the conflict between rich capitalists and impoverished laborers, set the tone for many other class conflicts that followed. Understanding Luddism’s roots is deeply relevant for contemporary Catholic social thought on labor justice, especially in the era of AI.
Link here. Note: this was written by a guy I went to school with, do me a favor and spread it around--Levi is pretty dope.
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Every time an AI apologist calls me a Luddite, I laugh so hard because there is something wildly AI-coded about applying a word to a situation without knowing what that word actually means. "Hey, ChatGPT, give me a mean name to call people who resent attempts to forcibly restructure their entire society via the introduction of a dubious new tech!" / "I think the word you're looking for is Luddites."
So let's talk about the original historical Luddites!
Were they anti-technology? I know this will shock AI apologists, but it's complicated. There's nuance. Shocking, innit?
The Luddites are historically known for being super-pissed by the presence of automated looms, so they were definitely against that piece of technology, but we don't see them protesting against underground sewers, synthetic fertilizers, or any of the other techs popping up left and right around them. (Eventually the movement spread to other fields for all the same reasons, but it started with weaving and that's where we'll be focusing because that's where the term and concept originates.) So why looms in particular? Why were these people who used to spend HOURS weaving a few yards of fabric at home so pissed off that there was a machine to do it for them, and faster? Well, I could honestly go on all day, but I'll try to keep it relatively brief.
The led to insane levels of unemployment and took money (and thus food in a time before widespread social services) away from work-from-home mothers, the disabled, families that did a bit of weaving in the evenings to make ends meet, etc etc etc. Small businesses, wiped out. Artisans whose families had been weaving for generations, redundant. Families that need a little extra to get by, fuck 'em, there's a profit to be turned by the people who really matter! If a few (thousand) people have to go hungry or lose their home or suddenly can't afford medical care, I'm afraid that's just the price of progress.
They led to super unsafe working conditions. Why would you turn off your motor loom just because it needs to be cleaned? Those things will go 24/7 if you've got a human supervising them, so it's faster and turns a greater profit to make people fix any problems while they're still running. And since people are being worked relentlessly, sleep deprivation was also an issue, making people clumsier than they might otherwise be. People were losing fingers and hands frequently as a result of this mindset. Further, the air in these new factories was chock full of cotton/wool dust. This leads to a condition called "white lung" where the lungs became increasingly clogged. It was a pretty horrible death. Dying in a fire or explosion must have seen almost merciful in comparison, so good news if you're an early factory textile worker! Your odds of dying in a fire or explosion before white lung can make every breath agony, are actually reassuringly high. All that fluff in the air is highly combustible and you live in an age where most people smoke. Have fun with that!
Child labor! Obviously, kids had always worked in Britain, but they were working alongside adults on farms, or at home, being (for the most part) properly supervised by people who loved them and understood the limits of their little bodies. Factory owners looked at those little bodies and only saw how suited they were to sweeping out underneath automated looms, clearing jams in tight spaced, etc. As mentioned above, this was all happening while the workers were sleep-deprived and the looms were still running. Children, too, were losing limbs. Sometimes they were even crushed to death (to the great displeasure of factory owners who had to turn off the looms so the mess could be cleaned up, and so much fabric would be ruined when some inconsiderate child's blood was splashed all over it).
So why smash the looms instead of just organizing and demanding better working conditions? At the time it was still common for factory owners to call in the military to shoot protestors. The military was fully authorized to shoot protestors dead, and if you don't believe me, go look up Peterloo. And, of course, all these people who suddenly can't find jobs elsewhere (because weaving was all their family never knew and was how they stayed self-reliant for centuries) now need money badly if they want to keep themselves and their kids alive. You'll put up with a lot if your kid is hungry.
Mass unemployment, unsafe work conditions, the risk of getting shot if you protest, being forced to also send your children to work in dangerous factories so they don't starve. All in the service of creating a bland, uniform, often-defective product (what, you thought these factories had a QC department?). One that used to be crafted by hand, safely and ethically, by trained artisans.
So on the one hand, people who use "Luddite" as an insult to the anti-AI crowd are right on the money. People are being forced out of jobs, their surroundings are becoming increasingly unsafe, art and skill have been rendered redundant (only not really because AI sucks at pretty much anything that's not predicting weather). But the people using the word as derogatory are so ignorant of context, that they actually think it's a mortal insult to accuse people of being angry about these things. And the more they lean on AI, the more ignorant of context they will become until they are rendered entirely incapable of critically analyzing anything for themselves.
While they do that, I'll be over here jealously guarding my critical thinking skills and my moral compass, thank you very much.
I'm not suggesting we start smashing up data centers or anything, but maybe (metaphorically) smash the systems that led to them being forced down our throats in the first place...
Courtney Radsch discusses rehabilitating the idea of Luddites as people concerned with the control and impact of technology.
It’s time to rehabilitate the Luddites as guides for the present. They understood that the future is not written by the machine, but by those who wield it. To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability and to demand that technology serve the many, not just the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency, and justice must come before speed, efficiency, and scale.
I don't have a solution for the massive energy-suck AI uses. I just know "honor system where we shame each other into not using the obviously useful new technology" isn't it.
There should be government caps on the consumption by these plants
AND hopefully there will be ways to make these plants more efficient, as there have been with previous computer technologies
AND humanity desperately needs a new clean energy source because expecting our consumption to decline or plateau is naive.
Like bruh I don't know what to tell you. You might be able to convince a portion of people to unplug from the grid on the grounds that you don't like the direction the grid is headed. But I don't see us going back to horse-carts and glass containers any time soon either. Once the genie is out of the bottle, fighting against the normalization of a new technology is a losing battle.
And if your stance is that the machine capable of humanoid associative reasoning has no applicable utility in the fields of science let alone entertainment, you're not ready to have a serious discussion about the future of that technology.
