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Google "wage theft US" ... I think some people treat people well, but I've met too many small business owners who bristle at paying minimum wage.
How much power do such people have? (Clearly not zero, but ...)
This version of the Luddites is the one I was taught in my history classes—in both HS and college my teachers were careful to emphasize that the colloquial usage and the actual movement are only loosely related, and we discussed how the Luddites weren't rejecting technology per se so much as they were acting out of desperation to preserve their way of life. This is certainly something worth learning from today, and a…
> they were acting out of desperation to preserve their way of life Should I have the right to preserve my way of life when it imposes costs on others?
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That's essentially capitalism. Profit > everything else
That's human nature. You won't get a better deal in Russia, China or any theoretical utopian civilization you dream up either. I don't know what the answer is, but it sure as hell isn't blaming everything on capitalism.
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I love this so much. The reality of _all_ technology is that it allows individuals to do more themselves. It condenses the knowledge domain to accomplish a task. In my mind, there are no downsides in allowing individuals more leverage. The real downsides are with the orthogonal problem of what productivity means in civil society. High productivity through technology is perfectly human - we're tool-builders and tool-m…
Sure, if you look at artificial intelligence as a tool (perhaps there is still no reason not to), but the end goal here is not to assist but to replace, isn't it ?
I thought that this had been the conventional view for a while now. Certainly it is what i have believed for many years, that the Luddites were reacting to iniquitous working practices and market forces.
You are definitely correct, but there is a popular perception that Luddites are just reactionarily "opposing progress" because it hurts their own personal interests.
There's plenty of rhetoric about whether technology advancements will be a good thing or not. But I think that distracts from the core message, that the most important matter is not whether we use technology, but how we treat our fellow humans. By replacing labour with robots and not compensating them, you're sending a clear message that you don't respect people and the value that they bring. We have a mandate for us…
We need a new era of carefulness in computing, both as programmers and as users. We need to demand better accountability. As long as the leaders we have now are still there tomorrow, I'm afraid this goal will never happen. You need a nation who cares more about its people than its GDP to achieve that, and I posit no nation on Earth has that level of care for its people.
There's plenty of rhetoric about whether technology advancements will be a good thing or not. But I think that distracts from the core message, that the most important matter is not whether we use technology, but how we treat our fellow humans. By replacing labour with robots and not compensating them, you're sending a clear message that you don't respect people and the value that they bring. We have a mandate for us…
Imagine if we were all working 18 hour subsistence farming jobs now just to survive, it's ridiculous to argue that eschewing automation for anything is detrimental, it only serves to enhance society and make it more productive.
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The people in positions of power are going to treat their fellow humans as poorly as they can get away with. That's how they got their positions of power.
I think you'd find that, on average, "as poorly as they can get away with" actually does mean that they treat people quite well. I'm not sure what hierarchies you've been a part of where people actively trying to treat people poorly leads to their success - I'd wager those are few in far between in reality, and over represented in media. Maybe you're cynical about a few high profile companies or how U.S. politics app…
Within any organization, you will have the sociopaths who want the glitz and title and power but have no respect for those they'll have to knock down to get there. That is what we're talking about.
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That's essentially capitalism. Profit > everything else
That's human nature. You won't get a better deal in Russia, China or any theoretical utopian civilization you dream up either. I don't know what the answer is, but it sure as hell isn't blaming everything on capitalism.
People who align with that are profiting from capitalism.
Just because Luddites were sympathetic doesn't change the fact that they were wrong. They didn't care for the welfare of workers in general so much as they were looking out for themselves. It did not matter to them that hundreds of thousands of peasants chose to move to find work in the cities because it was better than life in the countryside and by destroying machinery, Luddites were taking away their livelihoods while the factories were shut down.
It's usually at this time that someone will bring up the enclosure of common land as the reason why people were forced out of the countryside, but that doesn't change that factory life was still offered a better alternative for a lot of people. The privatization of fertile land was inevitable with a growing population. Without the new factory jobs, even more people would be stuck as serfs like they were in China or Russia at the time.