Why the Luddites Matter
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com
People reading this may be interested in Lord Byron's first speech to the House of Lords as well, which was a full-throated defense of the Luddites. As you might guess, it's beautifully written. It also nicely magnifies the historical irony of Byron fathering Ada Lovelace.
http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html
"Considerable injury has been done to the proprietors of the improved frames. These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. Yet it is to be observed, that the work thus executed was inferior in quality, not marketable at home, and merely hurried over with a view to exportation. It was called, in the cant of the trade, by the name of Spider-work. The rejected workmen, in the blindness of their ignorance, instead of rejoicing at these improvements in arts so beneficial to mankind, conceived themselves to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism. In the foolishness of their hearts, they imagined that the maintenance and well doing of the industrious poor, were objects of greater consequence than the enrichment of a few individuals by any improvement in the implements of trade which threw the workmen out of employment, and rendered the labourer unworthy of his hire. And, it must be confessed, that although the adoption of the enlarged machinery, in that state of our commerce which the country once boasted, might have been beneficial to the master without being detrimental to the servant; yet, in the present situation of our manufactures, rotting in warehouses without a prospect of exportation, with the demand for work and workmen equally diminished, frames of this construction tend materially to aggravate the distresses and discontents of the disappointed sufferers. But the real cause of these distresses, and consequent disturbances, lies deeper."
No, the Luddites where not against technology, and those using the term properly are not saying that. Luddites rebelled against workplace automation, with the explicit view that it renders skilled human labor unable to compete and has disastrous social consequences. To call someone a modern Luddite has a very specific meaning, it denotes opposition based on employment circumstances.
We aren't talking about Google Glass, mass surveillance, social credits or any ethically troubling technology that is yet to be accepted by society. We are talking about technology designed to increase productivity of regular, already accepted goods that has no nefarious effects other than unemployment, and that, during the last 300 years, increased productivity, lower prices and released humanity from industrial slavery.
The question is: can this process go on forever, aren't we hitting a hard ceiling of human adaptability where the thinking machines will make us totally unable to compete in the workplace? The Luddites matter, but not in the way the author surmises.
This was the article's highlight for me. As a senior programmer I found myself saying "no" to more and more tech nowadays -- smart speakers are and will always be not welcome in my house, I carefully study mobile app permissions and deny everything but the absolutely necessary minimum (on my mother's phone as well), I am unplugging microphones and webcams when not using them, I refuse to buy washing machines and any kind of kitchen tech with touch screens (they are awfully non-durable, big surprise right?) and prefer tech with real, physical buttons.
I am never gonna give WiFi access to my TV. I am even considering making my home WiFi network hidden (not advertised). If you manually specify SSID and password you will connect alright but you can never see the SSID. I feel this might be a necessary default before too long. We'll see.
I did give WiFi access to my printer because accessing it through the router's USB port turned into a nightmare of problems and inconsistency. I disallowed it to make outgoing connections (through the router) anywhere but in the local network however -- I don't want it going to the internet.
Point is, new tech is marketed as "progress" for mercantile reasons by the big corps and me and many others aren't just taking their word for it when they say it's for the best of all of us.
My rather depressing observation has been that historically, ever since the 90s, technology and especially computers / phones aren't used to improve people's lives; they only complicate them and increase people's time, energy and money expenses. To actually improve your life with tech you have to go a lot of extra miles.
The marketed "progress" technologies don't deserve the benefit of the doubt lately. It's all but a historical fact that most "progress" is mostly "guys, here's a new market we just invented, please buy because we want the money".
GPS in my pocket. Internet connected calorie counting app. Streaming whatever show I want on demand instead of watching the one show that's on. Paying $120 dollars a year to listen to whatever music I want to. A calendar that's on all my devices that my wife can add things on. A speaker that can stream my music straight from the internet by itself.
Those are just the things I can think off of the top of my head.
I do make heavy use of my phone's productivity apps -- calendars, shopping lists, todo lists, and many others. What I do not use though is stuff like Facebook and the numerous mind-numbing "games" trying to strong-arm you into buying their diamond currency every 15 minutes.
I also make heavy use of Safari's ability to pull my MacBook's tabs to my iPhone or iPad, or between any of them. Really helps when you started reading something at home and then want to finish reading it while in the subway, for example.
Let's just say that I am a proponent of the idea to make my devices work for me, not me working for them. And sadly the latter is what we are nudged towards by many apps and services. It seems everybody is trying to addict us and we have to actively fight that back and make sure our devices help our lives and don't turn us into zombies. Would you concur on that point?
Ditto. My so-called "smart" TV gets HDMI inputs and that's it. An external device connects to the Internet for Netflix etc and if that device ever displeases me or becomes truly obsolete, it can be swapped out for another. But it is extremely difficult to buy a non-smart-TV above a certain size these days. All I wanted was a high quality screen and some inputs - I don't believe in regular upgrades, too much e-waste, I want something that will last as long as a Trinitron did.
You end up having to sit progressively further away from them the bigger they are, which probably requires progressively larger rooms to put the TV in.
At 8', that's 60" screen size for 30 degrees (80" for cinema)
Now I treat these with a pinch of salt, they're SMPTE values, and the last SMPTE event I went to we all agreed that in the UK 4K is pretty much pointless for 80% of the country, but SMPTE can't say that because panel manufacturers want to sell new screens every few years. Still 30 degrees feels like a fairly good number.
Assuming you have 20:20 vision, and have a 60" TV, it's only worth going to UHD over 1080 for resolution if you're nearer than 8'. For a 40" TV, it's 5'.
Now UHD comes with other benefits, namely a higher temporal resolution (interlace has gone, there's no 2160i - thank god), and higher dynamic range. I suspect they'll flog 8k panels for the Tokyo 2020 olympics, but bundle 120fps at the same time.
• Bigger screens.
• Much better screens (like QLED by Samsung).
• Better hertz values (doesn't irritate the eyes).
• More "smart" builtin software and firmware, with tons of bugs and security holes.
• Bigger resolution.
I'd take all of the above points except the smart TV software. To be perfectly fair I also think 4K is the absolute maximum for resolution that we need to use on TVs for like 5-10 years, too. As many people pointed out in the past in other threads here in HN, I'd love for these TVs to come in two packages -- with and without the hardware module that gives it its "smart" software.
Alas, we don't have the choice. Our best course of action is:
(1) Never give our TV access to our WiFi network.
(2) Make sure to buy an HDMI cable with lower protocol version so it doesn't pass-through your Ethernet connection.
It's a pretty screwed up market. I bet 10-20% of the price of the modern TVs comes from the supposed value proposition of the "smart" features and our group of users pays this premium without needing it.
why will 5-10 years make any difference? Will living rooms become larger?
IMO we're hitting maximum levels beyond which there's no sense to continue -- except to sell us the latest and the shiniest.
However 4K isn't worth it until you get over 30 degrees, and any higher isnt worth it unless your tv is too large, at least with modern cinematic techniques.
I have a pretty decent Philips 58" TV and to be fair, watching it from the bed (2.5 - 3.0 meters) it does seem small to me.
However, if I am to buy a gaming console and sit like 1.5 meters away from the TV then it seems to be plenty enough, even a bit bigger than needed.
I will probably settle for 65" in the next 1-2 years or, if I want to spend a lot of money, 75". But that's because I plan on having a 40+ square meters (131 sq. ft.) living room.
My "smart TV" is a 4K Samsung with all it's smart features turned off connected to a PC running Xubuntu because that way I have control over it.
I don't own a single IoT thing, I have about 5 apps installed on my phone (4 of which are Chess related, 1 is my bank), I use the mobile web for everything else, if you don't have a usable web app I don't use your product.
I deliberately minimise the amount of technology to 'plain' computers running Linux because I understand those and feel in control.
No smart toasters for me.
tl;dr from the article:
> If the network name of a wireless network (SSID) is not broadcast, the clients must search for it with probe requests. So if you have one AP and 100 wireless devices, you partially limit exposure of the network name with one device while causing 100 devices to expose it instead.
Most OSes do this anyway to speed up the connection process (try to attach to last n networks and see what sticks). Can be abused to learn about past locations of that device by asking one of the wifi location api databases (iOS, win, google/android):
https://www.mylnikov.org/archives/1170
Edit: couldnt find good links about rapid wifi connecting procedures but here's an older article about Apple's rapid dhcp mechanism:
I had XBMC hooked up to my TV with samba share years before smart TVs were really popular.
I really liked wifi tv then, and I really like it now. Improved my life.
The straw man of them being anti technology crusaders was entirely a stereotype created and perpetuated by capitalists.
when it's about people, "rational" is the last thing we need. Empathy, sympathy, compassion is what you need.
Reason is not incompatible with compassion.
but "empathetically" i don't want the same thing to happen to me, so i tolerate your existence in hopes that you tolerate mine
For anyone taking your proposed rational course, however, me and my more rationally self-interested cohorts will eventually get wind of that game (assuming they act "rationally" according to your proposition), we'll band together to defeat them: after all it's in our interest to do so. Not that we're somehow altruists, but that we're self-interested for the long term, over the course of our lives rather than the next meal.
But even so, we don't need the threat of being pummeled by opponents to recognize the course of action you propose as "rational" is mere fools gold; we can see the benefits of the products of others as being far more enhancing than any one meal or some temporary bit of wealth. I gain tremendous benefit from the productivity of other people. Some of those people are artists, some are sanitation workers, some are engineers, and almost all I will have never known individually or even of their existence beyond the output of their minds and labor. It is in -my interest- that -they- thrive in a reasonable way, too. It's in my rational self-interest that they know they will reap the rewards of their efforts, rather than for me to simply steal it and undermine that trust.
All of this I can derive from the rational pursuit of my own self-interest.
You sometimes get scenarios where one human has disproportionate social control over a group, but even then experiments with democracy have shown it overwhelmingly outperforms the competition. So far on both an absolute and a per capita basis. Many (most?) of our morals also happen to be game-theory optimums that you would raitionally see value in even as a true sociopath.
What you describe isn't rational, it is some combination of desperation and short term thinking. The rational approach has always been to organise and cooperate. If you actually tried to behave that way you would discover that what you call 'behaving rationally' will involve you having no material goods, comfort or prospect for obtaining them.
Yet our sociopaths are all up running companies that destroy the environment. They seem to entirely gravitate towards the very behaviors the person you're replying to is afraid of (i.e., self-serving philosophies, domination and exploitation of others, etc.).
The problem is that the only scale that matters to a logic-only person is the scale of their personal life. And you can build yourself a pretty nice life while walking all over other people and not care at all that this will only survive for one generation, because then you'll be gone.
There are lots of other problems here, such as lack of the veil of ignorance. There's no mechanism to prevent the logic-focused mindset from gravitating towards castes if they think they and their children are safe from being in the bad castes.
Game-theory optimums are available to people through emotions and intuition. They're not available through logic (immediate logical processing is self-focused and therefore plays right into the worst parts of game theory: it doesn't have enough time to arrive at your thinking here). That's why people without these things tend to... uhh... have trouble adjusting, and the people who have enough mental processing to simulate and adjust tend to do pretty awful things.
"rationally", i shouldn't care about global warming because it's inconvenient to alter my lifestyle and because global warming will not affect me as much in my lifetime
but "empathetically" i care about the future environment i'm leaving for future humans
Rationally I should have multiple children, as my only legacy is my name.
Still rational, differing worldview.
Part of the worldview your thoughts on rationallity betray is that only the 'here and now' matter. Which only fits a very small philosophy even within the subset of humanity that have no belief in anything supernatural.
A worldview guides not just our view on our relationship to others, and ourselves, and not just moral conduct, but the end goals being targeted. Our rationallity cannot be divorced from our motivations.
Some worldviews are just 'to live another day', others are more nuanced, measuring impact against criteria.
For example, frugality is a worldview, where you don't have any rational compulsion to kill, steal and hoarde, as you don't need it anyway.
I would say that any view that includes a concept such as "legacy" is already highly irrational... there's nothing rational about having a world view that you do not call into doubt.
At the end of the day, you'll just gravitate towards a worldview that's the easiest to support. That's what tends to happen to people since cognitive dissonance hurts. There's nothing rational whatsoever in this entire process and it is the very start of the problem, you can't ignore it.
The whole problem with "rational" is that it's a poor term that got appropriated to describe behaviors that are not actually rational.
"Rational" is mostly a shorthand for "logically derived", which is only one rather shallow facet of processing, and, not all that surprisingly, can lead to rather irrational behaviors, like the ones the person you're responding to is referencing. It often leads to nihilism, amoral philosophies, and other things that play right into the worst parts of game theory. Because this is what we naturally do if we turn off other processing. We have all the other processing for a reason.
Emotions, intuition, and experience are all very important. Pure logic cannot replace them, it is simply too slow, and there's simply not enough information. The reason a lot of us are really annoyed with rationalists is because they're walking around saying all those things don't matter.
But rationalism isn't short-termism. Rationalists can execute long term plans, potentially even multi-generational beneficial schemes, just as well as everyone else. And just as badly. As the comment you replied to succinctly argues, there is no causation between rationalism and values.
As an aside, logic isn't related to rationality any more deeply than logic is tied in to anything else. I suppose the opposite of a rationalist is a religious fundamentalist? Religious fundamentalists can be extremely logical too (as in, their actions can be completely consistent with their assumptions). Logic is just a technique to tell if some of your beliefs are inconsistent, it isn't monopolised by any given world view. And it certainly can't create new beliefs out of nothing, only evidence can do that.
Empathy is a mechanism for implementing morality, and all morality is enlightened self-interest.
I wish I was kidding.
Howard Rheingold's 1999 article (https://www.wired.com/1999/01/amish/) is a classic. Kevin Kelly has also written a lot about the Amish and their relation to technology.
If there are no alternative sources of income(welfare, UBI) that correct this, expect many more "Neo-Luddites" to emerge; specifically in areas targeted for automation.
Its not that these people would be "against progress", they would be against more concrete things(such as the article describes) like automated trucks/delivery and start attacking/robbing/sabotaging the machines to discourage their use instead of people. Just like some abuse automated cashiers(cash registers) to steal products and earlier trends of vending machine abuse: it doesn't register to people they are criminals because the target of crime isn't human, therefore justifying their impulse and intention. That means NeoLuddites don't lose their own 'moral high ground' and will be able to easily spread their ideologies as automation carries bigger and bigger chunk of the economy.
The difference being that the automation you want to smash is actually thousands of miles away in China; there are no local factories anymore for the neo-Luddites to target.
That goal, of course, is quite dubious, since it involves illiberality, authoritarianism, etc.
The taxi industry (especially black cabs in London) fits everything in this article, in my opinion. People who "just want to feed their children" trying to force democracy and capitalism to purchase a product (their skill, called "the knowledge") that has become obsolete, a product nobody needs anymore.
You have a skill. I'm sorry, that skill is no longer required in the world of 2018 for many years. Your job can now actually be done by anyone, and that is why you're getting competition. It's as if everyone with a liberal art's degree would demand to become a famous artist.
(a difference being of course that London black cabs are hugely corrupt, as seen by blatant disregard for payment rules, tax law, traffic rules and the fact that they fairly successfully make TFL act against the interests of everyone-who-is-not-a-black-cab-driver, which is most people)
rant over
But then, just paragraphs later, the same author casually throws out two of the most charged smears in modern discourse: "In the midst of recent years that have shown the sorts of racist and misogynistic biases that are often endemic in the tech world...". There is no explanation or justification of what is meant by this. There is certainly no nuance.
This seems endemic to modern discourse. We want a fair hearing of our own beliefs. We feel persecuted when others smear us. But we see no problem tossing around harsh judgments of others, with no nuance or recognition of other people's potentially noble goals.
I wonder if this author would be willing to give a fair and nuanced hearing towards people who are conservative on immigration (for example). Worry about immigrants taking jobs is one of the top reasons people give for opposing immigration. So the original Luddites and people who are conservative on immigration have something in common.
I think this paragraph from the article takes on new meaning if you substitute "immigration" and "xenophobia" for "technology" and "technophobia". I wonder if the author would still support the argument:
> And I must report that it seems quite obvious that terms like “anti-technology” and even “technophobia” are just signs of lazy thinking, they say far more about the person using those terms than the people being accused of being “anti-technology.” In the vast majority of cases when you actually consider what these so-called “anti-technology” folks believe you realize that they don’t oppose “all” technology but (brace yourself) particular technologies, being used in particular ways, in a particular context. This is not to pretend that genuinely “extreme” cases don’t exist, but to claim that someone who thinks Facebook has become too big wants us all to go back to living in the woods is patently absurd. Yet it is the type of absurdity that becomes common in a society that has lost the ability to think critically about technology.
My goal overall isn't to shame the author though. I want to argue that we should apply this charity towards everyone making arguments, not just the people who align with us.
Like "racist", "white supremacist" is tossed around ever more liberally in modern discourse. At Evergreen this year, people left graffiti saying that science without intersectionality is white supremacy. We need to engage ideas critically precisely to determine whether charges like "accused white supremacist" are even accurate.
The effect of industrial revolution was not just factory owners being wealthier or more powerful. It raised the workers wages and increased living standards for everyone
Understanding history is not just about passing verdicts on the outcomes with the benefit of hindsight. It's about understanding the process of change, why it happened, and how people living at the time viewed the changes and reacted to them.
An article like this sheds light on a lot of those topics, including people's beliefs about their economic rights at that time. It corrects common misconceptions about the Luddites. It demonstrates that the outcomes of the Industrial Revolution were not inevitable, and that people's understanding of what was going on at the time was very different than our understanding of it today. It opens the door to further research for people interested in the topic. It doesn't deserve a handwavy dismissal.
That said, I think the issue is largely one of mindset. Although we don't live very long, we are unusually adaptable, a feature which becomes lost in the comfort of an agreeable status quo. Unfortunately for the Luddites, it wasn't a feature that manifested again when that status quo was upended.
Yes, the industrial revolution enabled increased wages and living standards. But for them to actually happen, and trickle down to workers, people had to fight hard. The modern working standards are literally written in tears and blood of our forefathers.
Also:
> literally written in tears and blood
figuratively; tears and blood make shit writing materials.
http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2012/Aug/merriam-webster-is-roll...
You're welcome to use the word as you please. The majority of the English speaking world, however, disagrees with you. If you care about clarity and precision, "literally" is a word to avoid.
that's the unfortunate truth about "wealth redistribution" (aka "inequality").
it's quite logical : those who have much don't feel the need to give as much as those who feel the need to have more.
Right, but the pitch goes something like this: "sometime after you and your family have starved to death, people you've never met will enjoy increased living standards, and they won't even remember you or your sacrifice, pretty neat huh?".
Not very compelling, is it? Would you take that deal? Something like it is being offered to Workers in the trucking industry right now...
The people at the top of the economic foodchain are usually for too short-sighted to consider what will happen then.
Which doesn't matter much when you and your family starves -- as their families did, and workers fucked over by globalization and automation do.
One could shrug it off as "the cost of progress", but that's a luxury one has only when they are among those benefiting from it.
Technological advances -> new industries -> social tensions and hard political battle -> social changes -> living standards increased for everyone.
I've been a tech/gadget freak for pretty much all of my life, but I'm really starting to utterly hate the Internet of Shit. If I'm going to run a surveillance camera, I'd much rather build a Raspberry Pi-based system than buy a commercial one. I damn well DON'T want my car connected to the internet - if I want internet in the car, my phone will do just fine. When I bought a TV about a year and a half ago, I made sure that the set itself was dumb as a rock [0]; any "smarts" get plugged into HDMI ports.
[0] If I looked for a TV today, I might not even have that option. :(
When people call me a Luddite, as they invariably do, I tell them (my opinion) that the Luddites weren't anti-technology per se, but concerned about the effect of technology on society.
Now, I do happen to own a cell phone, but mentioning its cost (40 bucks plus 10 bucks a month) is usually sufficient to earn me the Luddite tag.
I've been considering getting rid of mine (and a local friend switched to a dumb phone[0]) but RMS is the first person that comes to mind when I think of a programmer without a cell phone.
[0]: http://jordancrane.me/2018/04/16/the-dumbphone-chronicles/
I think programmers are more likely to opt out of things like cell phones. More likely to be technically competent enough to be work around challenges of going with simplicity & more likely to want that simplicity. Also more likely to see behind the curtain of this post privacy world
Reporting in! Nobody has ever called me this -- to my face, at least.
At some point I may end up just moving my data-only phone from my car to my home as part of my commute but 2FA requirements right now are still light enough I would rather suffer the inconvenience of walking back to my car to get the device I use for my radio.
Often those fighting the hardest are doing so because they have a sweet deal. The people who are actually poor are more flexible... already working several jobs, or taking night classes to do better.
In the end it’s entightlement plain and simple.
Working harder too, and in a single very specialized field. So you take that away, what skills do they have? What choices are they free to make?
Often those fighting the hardest are doing so because they have a sweet deal.
The sweet deal of working deep underground on a coal face, in dirty, dangerous conditions? Uh huh. Besides you’re proving their point, when people out there just shrug and say “fuck ‘em, not my problem,” who wouldn’t fight? They don’t owe you anything either.
Not to mention that your “average salary” bit is deceptive. The average salary for a coal miner is around $65,000, while the average salary for a recent college grad with a bachelor’s is $50,000. Obviously that includes everything from engineering to expressive dance, and there is no definite ceiling. A coal miner is stuck on the low end, period, and painting them as privelaged... on HN... is pathetic.
Imagine instead of a blue collar worker which is easy to empathize with or glorify... a banker or lawyer or some other less well liked worker. Imagine those people making good money... saying their industry needs to be protected just so they can keep their jobs.
https://www.npr.org/2018/05/09/607273500/in-the-coal-countie...
My grandfather came to this country with nothing and put both his sons thru college, working multiple jobs, learning English.. with no skills! Never would he have complained if the company he worked at over 8 hours a day putting stuff in boxes closed because they were killing people. Coal is destroying the world plain and simple. It’s not much to ask to move on. It’s an industry that needs to end.
There's an advanced energy ecosystem that keeps a lot of really subtle and important things running as the human ecosystem evolves. Maybe at some point coal mining does get phased out in favor of less energy and cleaner energy, but you're gambling on that miner's tonnage not being necessary to clear that gap.
A society could also say, "No, coal stops tomorrow," but a lot of places tried "Everyone's a farmer tomorrow" in the 20th century for very similar reasons and hundreds of millions of people starved to death.
That coal miner isn't only feeding his family, that miner feeds and warms probably thousands of people. To phase out his job, you need a willful change in the infrastructure of the places he serves: you would need everyone to live somewhere without heating, to give up some amount of electricity use, and to begin food production independent of energy (which is a lark, if you've ever tried to grow a crop it is not easy, especially without Haber process or crop defense agents).
You're going to have to back up that claim with some very strong evidence.
Generally speaking, we eat stuff to gain energy and stay alive, and process it into byproducts. Since we need heat and cooking and transit, we end up eating uranium and coal as much as food.
As far as the environmental impacts of the energy economy are concerned, I'd like to think that the worst of it was noticed and mitigated when the EPA was formed. Lots of the numbers about one form of energy versus another and the cost-benefit analyses are (as my argument was for you) way too much conjecture than I can be comfortable with.
Fossil fuels and nuclear power are unsavory but they can't be halted without catastrophic repercussions, people freezing and going hungry and unemployed. A world which works without those technologies is not a feasible option for most people, in much the same way as the population explosion almost eradicated subsistence living.
I think the most important thing about the Luddites is they're a reminder that a certain portion of the population in an industrial revolution sees the fruits of the new technologies, but is also experiencing a literally-unbearable negative impact from those same technologies. Which society holds the other hostage is a matter of perspective entirely.
When you say "You don’t get to hold the rest of society hostage...", this just sounds like another way of calling anyone who disagrees with your thesis a Luddite, and to end the conversation. Who said the "rest of society" agrees with you in the first place?
I have a similar view here to what Scott Alexander explained in[0]. Humans were here first, society came later. To quote,
"Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have. Of course it owes him when he suddenly can’t support himself. Think of it as the ultimate use of eminent domain; a power beyond your control has seized everything in the world, it had some good economic reasons for doing so, but it at least owes you compensation!"
I'm very much a fan of progress of technology. But I want this progress to be for the good of all of us. Part of that is considering how that progress is affecting people and mitigating the negatives. Anything less is IMO complete lack of empathy.
--
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/ - trigger warning: mentions of mental health and suicide. But the conclusion is 100% transplantable to this topic, and the author acknowledged that in the text too.
For all I know, empathy might well be a disability that holds each of us back from doing his/her best. Why do you think it is so essential?
(EDIT: changed diction; changes are marked in italics)
What? No! Maintaining the very existence of each human, requires resources and labor. Obtaining others' resources and labor means you are either purchasing it or stealing it, and if the latter was ethical then we'd have a society full of thieves and bereft of anyone doing any honest productive work. So while you are entitled to exchange some of your valuable things or labor for the valuable things+labor that help you stay alive ... you are most certainly not entitled to simply have them "automatically". There's no such thing as a "free lunch".
On the contrary, it is technology and progress that are viewed with scepticism -- watch almost any recent sci-fi movie.
Though working with one is a bit annoying. Hey let’s design it this way it’s simpler umm no I don’t know how to code it that new way let’s do it the way I know. Sigh.
"The historic Luddites were skilled craft workers laboring in England in the early 19th century, and they were amongst the first groups to see their jobs and lifestyles fall victim to mechanization; their opposition to 'obnoxious' machinery was in keeping with their view that the imposition of these machines would bring 'a sad end to an honourable craft.'"
...which is exactly why myself and others generally ignore ludditism. To me this seems perfectly in line with the general understanding of the term: people that are being displaced by progress and become generally opposed to said progress as a result, often violently so.
I'm sorry if new technologies are hurting your lifestyle, but if the only way to become heard is to literally destroy that tech, then perhaps no one wants to listen.
Adapt or die. This is the way of evolution.