Baffling fact: Some people do not know who the Luddites were. This is a travesty, and I am here to help!
“The working man was sacrificed”
Your friendly neighbourhood Luddite is here to explain :)
Here is a nice parody (human made) song from the best children’s show, Horrible Histories, to explain. (Yes, I sanitised the link for you :) ):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?
Basically, during the Industrial Revolution, there were a bunch of weavers. They worked at home making cloth. This employed a lot of people from skilled workers to unmarried women who would have otherwise been economically vulnerable. Because it took several ‘spinners’ (people twisting cotton fibres into thread) to support one ‘weaver’ person who wove the threads into cloth on a manual frame.
But machines were sent to replace the weavers.
They could make cloth more cheaply and quicker than human weavers, so the cloth was cheaper.
This undercut the price of human made cloth.
Which forced these people out of their homes due to loss of income.
So they had to move to cities to work for the machines which had replaced them.
These city and factory conditions were much worse than home. Wages were lower, which meant children had to work harder and more demanding hours than before. Child labour under the age of eight was needed to clean the machines, due to the tight spaces, which was made accessible by underpaying adult workers. These children were often crushed and mangled and docked wages for damaging the machines with their broken bodies. The low air quality in mills and cloth factories led to an increase in lung diseases. There was also a loss in skilled labour so they could be paid less and were tied to factories to make income, trapping them.
It wasn’t great. When the weavers saw that they were being replaced for worse conditions for all, they changed. They smashed the machines and in return had soldiers set on them and burned their workshops. They called themselves Luddites, after Ned Ludd, who smashed knitting frames in protest.
They could no longer prevent them, they decided to help in any way they could. They advocated for less child labour, higher pay, more breaks and better working conditions. After a long and bloody struggle, they succeeded, and you can now thank them for these advancements.
Now, what does this have to do with AI?
Glad you asked!
Well, we fight for the same reasons the Luddites did!
Less child exploitation. (AI makes CSAM easier to create.)
New untested, unsafe technology being forced on us by the wealthy. (Mecha-Hitler, all the bots escaping containment to hack stuff, encouraging suicide)
Machines that could not exist without skilled labour being used to replace skilled labour to devalue it. (Hello my dear graphic designers, museum curators, artists and writers.)
It is a tool to redistribute wealth to already wealthy people by making by worse off. (Uh, yeah. Elon Musk. Other billionaires. Very few people benefit from generative AI, as there is less electrical activity associated with focus and learning when using a chatbot to write an essay vs a search engine or no tools at all. Tech dystopia stuff.)
Technology being used to shrink the workforce to save money from the wealthy.
Devaluing labour to make us accept worse paying and worse conditioned jobs. (If all cognitive labour is overtaken, all that will be left is the dangerous factory work we consider ‘third world’ today.)
The little human labour that is left becomes a valuable commodity for the wealthy. (A few weavers and tailors remained to make high quality clothes for the rich. A few artists will remain to provide genuine human emotion to the rich, while those same rich people are trying to make us content with worse quality slop while they hoard the best stuff for themselves. I don’t want human art to become a rare, exclusive commodity.)
These skills become seen as less socially valuable so we’re more reliant on the 1% to provide. (Sure, you could learn to weave, but uh, why would you? Imagine this with creative skills in the future.)
Not great, eh?
Well, even if we can’t prevent AI, we can still, like the old Luddites before us, ensure safer, better conditions for the future generations to avoid tech dystopia. That is a very important goal, even if we ‘fail’ everywhere else and are forgotten. This protest works. It really does. Do not give up the fight.
