Use whatever means necessary to stop powerful people from exploiting you and stealing the fruits of your labor. If that struggle involves monkeywrenching their machines, so be it.
But like any tool, the machines themselves can be used for good or evil. Breaking the machines shouldn't be an end in itself.
The Luddites wouldn't have been destroying machines if they had insurance that they would also benefit from the machines, rather than see their livelihoods being destroyed while the boss made more money than ever.
Your strawman about spinning and digging with no tools is just that, and is irrelevant to the core issue of capitalism.
It seems like you identify yourself with the strawman instead of with the core issue.
Being anti-AI is not a straw man, it's the logical conclusion of being against exploitation and hierarchical domination. Discussing that nuance here is difficult, to say the least, so it's simpler to say anti-AI.
However what’s more interesting is the deeper social contracts involved. Destroying other people’s stuff can be perfectly legal such as fireman breaking car windows when someone parks in front of a fire hydrant. Destroying automation doesn’t qualify for an exception, but it’s not hard to imagine a different culture choosing to favor the workers.
I don't think Luddites had an easy justification like this.
On the other side, there were cheap textiles for EVERYONE - plus some profits for the manufacturers.
They might have been fighting to save their livelihoods, but their self-interest put them up against the entire world, not just their employers.
During industrial revolution, the clothes (and other fabrics) were getting dramatically cheaper. A family that could only afford cheapest clothes could now get a higher quality stuff. A family that could not afford any clothes at all, could now get cheap stuff.
This is what the luddites wanted to stop. It's not "luddites starving to death" vs "factory owner get no profit", it was "luddites starving to death" vs "many many more people can not afford clothes"
People did starve to death and turn to things such as alcohol due to labour displacement during Industrialization. At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that lower-class people were naturally inferior. Robert Owen challenged this theory.
And yes, that was the choice given to the Luddites. Have no work (and therefore no food), because the factory owner can replace you with machines, and you have no labour rights, so he will simply cast you out and make more profit. I did not miss Mr2Z's argument, yours is just incorrect.
Citation needed for that one.
> Except for the fact that the Luddites' labour grievances could easily have been addressed by the factory owners (rise in pay, better conditions) while still offering cheaper fabrics through industrialization.
So how long would the employers be required to pay them, in your mind? A year? Ten? A lifetime?
It would be the end consumer of the textile that would have to pay for those former textile workers to do nothing.
People can find new jobs when the world changes. It's not pleasant, but it's frankly a lot better than trying to force their old employer to keep them on payroll in a job where they can't do work.
This is what you don't understand. There was no re-tooling or re-training for the Luddites. This wasn't a 20th century downsizing situation. This was one step above slavery. They didn't just go get new jobs. They got extremely precarious work with no labour rights (at all) at lower pay than before and in competition with hordes of desperate unemployed labourers. This has nothing to do with free market economics like you're posting.
"citation needed for that one."
Actually no, you're the one who keeps saying that industrialization / replacing human workers with machines saved people's lives with cheap textiles, but you show no proof of this, so you're the one who needs a citation!
So if society is actually saving 5c/shirt while “losing” 9$ in labor per shirt. On net society could be worse off excluding the one person who owns the factory and is way better off. Obviously eventually enough automation happens so the price actually falls meaningfully, but that transition isn’t instantaneous where decisions are made in the moment.
Further we currently subsidize farmers to a rather insane degree independent of any overall optimization for social benefit. Thus we can’t even really say optimization is the deciding factor here. Instead something else is going on, the story could have easily been framed as the factory owners doing something wrong by automating but progress is seen as a greater good than stability. And IMO that’s what actually decides the issue for most people.
In the case of the Luddites, it was a literal case of their children being threatened with starvation. "Livelihood" at the time was not fungible. The people affected could not just go apply at another industry. And there were no social services to help them eat during the transition period.
As for the farmers, any governing body realises that food security is national security. If too many people eschew farming for more lucrative fields, then the nation is at risk. Farming needs to appear as lucrative as medicine, law, and IT to encourage people to enter the field.
Similarly US agricultural output could be cut in half without serious negative consequences. Far more corn ends up as ethanol than our food and we export vast quantities of highly subsidized food to zero benefit. Hell ethanol production costs as much in fossil fuels as we get ethanol from it, it’s literally pure wasted effort.
Rational policy would create a large scale food shortage and then let market forces take over. We could have 10 years of food on hand for every American at way less expensive than current policy with the added benefit of vastly reducing the negative externalities of farming such as depleting aquifers.
> Rational policy would create a large scale food shortage and then let market forces take over.
Well I'm just going to state that I'm _really_ happy that you're not the one in charge and leave it at that.
Risk management means managing risks, there’s plenty of things having more farmland doesn’t actually protect you from. On the other hand having a decade of food protects you from basically everything as you get time to adjust as things change.
Just as an example, meteor strike blocks sunlight and farmland is useless for a few years. Under the current system most of us starve to death. Odds are around 1 in 1 million that it happens in a given lifetime, but countries outlive people start thinking longer term and it becomes more likely.
I completely agree that the current way things are being handled appears to have its share of problems and could stand to be better optimized. But that doesn't mean it's useless either.
Producing dramatically less food and ending obesity are linked. If the average American eats 20% less obesity would still be an issue, but that’s a vast amount of farmland we just don’t need.
The current system isn’t designed to accommodate increased agricultural production, lowering food demands, or due to decreasing fertility the slow decline in global population. Instead the goal is almost completely to get votes from farmers.
I'm happy to debate what sort of free food the government should or shouldn't be handing out, what measures could be put in place to minimize waste, etc. But from my perspective the ideal is a free all you can eat buffet that's backed by the government.
“For clarity, Ozempic etc have actually measurably decreased food consumption.”
Technology isn’t going backwards, we can expect increasingly effective medications with fewer side effects at lower costs to drive down food demand over time. Policies designed to prop up production in the face of falling demand are deeply flawed.
If you want to give people money, give them money, don’t give them lots of money so they can keep a little bit while they waste resources producing something without value.
To be clear I don't object at all to the idea of optimizing how subsidies are determined. I just don't think that subsidies and the resultant overproduction are a bad thing in general. I'm all for efficiency in the general case but I think a fair amount of paranoia is called for regarding long tail scenarios that lead to famine.
Obviously that impacts food demand.
Moreover, I am not sure how long will it take to re-build the farm industry if most farms will close. I think "10 years" is too optimistic, given how many farms will need to be spun up.
That said, we can preserve viable sperm for 50+ years. https://www.techexplorist.com/worlds-oldest-semen-still-viab...
Maintaining nutritional content isn’t a major hurdle.
Stored food is not bullet proof, and takes up a lot more bulk space than you may think. It can also take numerous years to ramp up farming production in response to a drop in yields or disaster.
Suggesting we’ll run into the same issues as people before the green revolution is ignoring the progress of technology.
And there is also all the political and financial barriers to taking unfarmed land and very quickly turning it into farmland. Who owns it and who owned it before? Who with the right knowledge to manage it properly will run it? What about other problems around them that are part to the famine.
And farming in itself is not very predictable business. Yields regularly vary by 30% just due to local weather without being considered unusual. Return on investments may be a decade down the road even if everything is done perfect. Getting people to invest long term for a potentially very short term problem is not super easy.
We got surviving rations from back in the US civil war that are still edible, but people still regularly starved and had famines despite massive leaps in food preservation technology. Hermetically sealing just a single persons food for a year is not an easy task, not to mention hundred million+.
Of note I didn’t say a year or 2’s notice 10 years of food on hand would be fairly cheap and we currently have the surplus to hit that number quickly. And that’s for 100% replacement, most situations aren’t going to drop food production to zero giving us more time.
Can you explain why? I don't understand.
In this particular case: for many people, Waymo provides a better service (clean, safer driving, etc..) than Uber or Lyft. This threatens livelihood of human Uber/Lyft drivers. If you sympathize with human Uber/Lyft drivers, and don't care about Waymo users, you want to make Waymo worse, hoping that the people will stop riding Waymo and move to Lyft/Uber instead.
One way to do so is to make riding in Waymo unpleasant, and it's certainly unpleasant when people are cutting your car off all the time!
That said, I don't really see how is it wrong?
- New technologies provided better service for general public, so people chose those - this seems to be true. In case of luddites, we are talking about dramatic price decreases in fabric (and by extension, clothes) - at least 2x, much more in some cases. A family who could not afford new clothes could suddenly buy them. And sure, they might have been worse quality - but before, they were unaffordable.
- The same technologies threatened way-of-life of old producers - also true. The textile workers got significantly worse deal. Who wants to pay 180d/lb to artisans for hand-made textile, when you could get factory-made for 12d/lb? And factory working conditions were horrible.
- The "solution" was to stop new technologies, so that there rest of the nation do not get the benefits. This also seems true - for a lot of the luddites goals were destruction of machines. As [1] said, "The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery". They wanted to go back to the time time where people were paying 180d/lb for fabric. Sure, it'd mean a kid would freeze to death because their poor family could not afford new coat, but it did not matter as long as artisan croppers keep getting paid.
(Things would have been quite different if luddites instead said: "we are going to destroy machines until we get higher wages / better conditions / etc...", and it seems that a few groups did say that. But majority did not say this, instead lashing out at all the machines in general)
[0] https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/cost-quality-and-the-effici...
Neither of your links say anything about cheap textiles stopping people from freezing to death. The Luddites' concerns could easily have been addressed by factory owners while still offering cheaper fabrics.
Neither of your links ALSO say that the majority of Luddite groups did as you say in destroying machinery without a goal in mind. The fact is that the Luddites were reacting against extremely unfair labour conditions, not progress. What you have said here is 100% untrue.
If you deliberately impede the flow of traffic, vehicularly assault, or otherwise sabotage the health and safety of drivers, passengers, and/or pedestrians, what do you deserve?
If you cause whiplash intentionally, what do you deserve?
What would be use of equal force in self defense in response to the described attack method?
Are movements valid if they have aims that you agree with, or are economic self-interest motivated, and invalid otherwise?
Something in people's brains often makes them think they are anonymous when they are driving their car. Then that gets disastrously proven otherwise when they need to show up in front of a judge.