What Luddites can teach us about resisting an automated future
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
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.
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:
tnftp -o'|grep -o "alt=\".*"\" class"|sed "s/alt=./@/;s/.\{13\}$//;s/"/\"/g"|tr @ \\n|fmt' \
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/28/1088262/luddites-resisting-automated-future-technology/amp/Amen to that brother. The level of obnoxiousness of this site is hard to match, even in today's dysfunctional web environment.
I'll never open a technologyreview.com page again, they should go fuck themselves and die in flames.
I also flagged this post, this sort of crap shouldn't make HN front.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
If its worth something we may bid and they may refuse, counter bid or release into the wild.
We aren't always imaginative enough to fund research in advance. (put mildly)
I've seen a D&D subreddit that bans AI art but encourages the use of art taken from google images.
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.
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.)
I still think generative AI is an exciting technology but the tech hype wave brainrot makes working in this space such a slog
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.
But it should be up to the consumer; the artisan shouldn't be able to ban machine-made goods to protect their livelihood.
I think we have this backwards.
Why would we encourage society to make things no one wants?
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.
'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.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...
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.
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'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.
> 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.
The menial jobs we're left with are just the ones that were hard to automate.
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.
You should try it.
The positive benefits of doing manual labour outdoors are immeasurable.
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.
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."
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.
To who?
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.
And you say that on International Woman's Day! :)
a loom of an idea, as it were, that is worthy of being smashed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c
[1] http://rickroderick.org/308-baudrillard-fatal-strategies-199...
[2] https://archive.org/details/baudrillard-fatal-strategies
[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780936756509/fatal-strategies/
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.
> 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"
You see, it's a powerful move :)
"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".
I'm gonna take your advice right there.
I had hoped people had gotten the message by now that automation improves our lives in uncountable ways.
I feel that the problem is not "theft" but the fear of being replaceable in the workforce.
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.
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.
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.
And as others have noted, it's well understood that the Luddites initiated the violence. That makes them the bad guys.
> 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.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
From your post: The Luddites were not anti-technology
Both of these statements can't be true. Which one (if either) is correct?
The primary beneficiary of machine looms is the people who can now afford to own 20 shirts instead of just one.
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.
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.
If you disagree, well, other sites beckon.
"Vox populi, vox Dei" works great, right up until it doesn't.
National socialism is the result of the rest of europe impoverishing germany post ww1 - not the desires of a people left to flourish
As for communism, that’s far to big a topic to crack open this deep in the comments.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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...