The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down::Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.
”Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”
I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself. But I believe, as the original Luddites argued in a particularly influential letter threatening the industrialists, that we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality”—whether it causes many to suffer for the benefit of a few—and oppose it when necessary.
Would be a bit more like “i consider myself a Christian, not because i follow the mainstream conception of Christianity but because i read what Jesus himself said and agree with it.”
The author states that she’s been a tech writer for 10 years and that she thinks AI is going to ruin journalism because it gives too much power to AI providers.
But, have you seen the state of journalism? AI killing it would just be an act of mercy at this point. How much SEO optimized, grammatically correct, appropriately filtered, but ultimately useless “content” do I really need to sift through to get even something as simple as a recipe?
The author can bemoan AI until she’s blue in the face, but she’s willfully ignoring that the information that most people get today is already controlled by a handful of people and organizations.
The original Luddites were hailed as folk heroes—they were cheered in the streets as they smashed machinery, and they were championed by Lord Byron. Today, at a time when a majority of Americans are in favor of stronger tech regulation, workers like the writers and actors pushing for protections against AI are popular too. In one Gallup poll, Americans sympathized with the writers over the studios by 72 to 19 percent
I don’t know if it’s just where I went to school but the Luddites weren’t portrayed as folk heroes there. They were portrayed as people digging their heels in the sand against change.
That’s also an extremely big range for a percentage. I wonder how the poll was setup.
A 9% undecided actually sounds about right, and actually smaller than I would have expected considering how poorly most people understand or care about the subject matter
And “Luddite” today has been repainted into what you said, but yeah, they weren’t seen like that at the time
“Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.”
The problem with Luddism is that it objectifies unwanted behavior. Instead of “hiring children to run machines is bad,” the argument becomes “the machines are bad because people hire children to run them.”
The machines are just machines. They have no inherent benefits or harms. It’s always the people and what they do with them.
Luddism was about industrialization taking jobs away. It was not against the machines. The machines were seen as a tool of the wealthy plutocrats taking away their jobs. They sabotaged the machines as revenge. They didn’t blame the machines, they blamed the wealthy. But they couldn’t get revenge on the wealthy so easily.
They still took hammers to machines and not the wealthy. The modern variant of Luddites are talking about banning technologies outright instead of uses of said tech. Also, the discussion I’ve seen online is almost always strictly black and white and often ignores the people, instead focusing on the tech.
The actions and words of the Luddites don’t seem reflect what you’re saying from my PoV.
I don’t think that’s true, at least not generally. To my knowledge, they saw themselves as enforcing the law. Indeed, old laws banned certain types of machines, limited who could possess them, and how many. These corporations had been influential in previous centuries, and so laws protected their interests, but also balanced the interests of individual members. (Today we would probably call it a cartel or trust, rather than a corporation.)
At the time of the Luddites, these laws were no longer enforced. They had tried before the courts and by writing government, but their lobbying was unsuccessful. So they took it upon themselves to break the “illegal” machines and again limit competition and productivity.
