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Rethinking the Luddites

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Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#521

Post by chromoblob »

andsoitis wrote: post #204
nico wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies already send that clear message even without AI. Companies are people. You are saying people running those companies are doing that to other people

> Companies are people. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. - Aristotle Companies exhibit emergent behavior that might be hard, if at all possible, to predict if you only had a single individual as reference. For instance, most individuals would probably never agree to manufacture a weapon that is specifically requested to kill your neighbor. However, this same individual will show no empathy and remorse…

Which is obviously irrational, so maybe we shouldn't care about such individuals, at least in long term.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#522

Post by Ygg2 »

chromoblob wrote: post #508
Ygg2 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When everything is X, nothing is X.

When everything exists, nothing exists? There are no universal properties? A non-trivial universal property for a domain asserts something non-trivial about everything in the domain. You think 'political' is a trivial property?

Who knows?

But this is reference to exceptional (low entropy) properties. If you multiply highly informational properties, they stop being informative. And move more towards white noise.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#523

Post by carlosjobim »

supertimor wrote: post #517
carlosjobim wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes is also a big part of why manufacturing is expensive in some places. If they were removed, the savings could be passed on to the customers.

You really think that the savings will actually be passed onto the consumer rather than the company gobbling up that extra value? Also, if taxes are lowered on businesses, the tax burden will be passed to the working poor/middle class.

> You really think that the savings will actually be passed onto the consumer rather than the company gobbling up that extra value?

Absolutely yes. Compare gas prices in countries with high taxes on gas and countries with low taxes on gas. Compare products that are subject to vice taxes. It is not hypothetical, it's reality.

> Also, if taxes are lowered on businesses, the tax burden will be passed to the working poor/middle class.

All taxes on businesses are passed onto the consumers already. For businesses that sell products and services that everybody uses, that means the taxes are passed on the working poor and middle class. The only way to have taxes explicitly excluding the poor and middle class is to have tariffs on luxury goods, and maybe vice taxes since those products are not essential.

There's no doubt that many company owners would try to use any tax reduction to make more profit for themselves, but that leaves space for competitors to take market share.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#524

Post by supertimor »

davidgoudet wrote: post #366
bbor wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think “only rich people are worried about automation” is a very reasonable take. And the scale is a bit different - the luddites weren’t throwing the economy into disarray, they were trying to stop it from changing.

Who said only rich people are worried about automation? And about the second point, yeah, of course, the Unabomber was not trying to throw the economy into disarray...

You keep mentioning the Unabomber. OP and the original article are talking about the original luddites, a group in the early 1800’s that fought back against poor working conditions (by destroying machinery, etc after discussion got them no where with their employers). The luddites were actually fine with the implementation of machines, and many of them were actually factory machinists themselves, they just wanted better pay and improved and safer working conditions.

Not exactly sure what your point is regarding the unabomber (who is considered a neo-Luddite, not a traditional Luddite). Is it that movements and labels change over time? Because what the unabomber wanted vs what the luddites wanted (almost a full two centuries before the Unabomber), were completely different things.

But even if we’re comparing the Luddite movement within their respective times, you’re taking an extreme example of a mentally ill domestic terrorist and conflating him with the entire Luddite movement, a movement that barely even exists in the 20th/21st century. Luddite is now used pretty casually to describe a technophobe or someone bad with technology. It doesn’t really describe a member of the Luddite movement anymore.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#525

Post by adasdasdas »

heavyset_go wrote: post #427
adasdasdas wrote: post #38

> Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers above the inequitable profitability of machines Being against the inequitable profitability of machines is just as dumb as being against technology, especially outside of a socialist context which this definitely was. It's basically crying that someone else is doing something better than you. In fact, I think being against technology wholesal…

> It's basically crying that someone else is doing something better than you. That "someone else" used state power to beat you, imprison you and starve your family if you dared to organize with other workers. Meanwhile, literal conspiracies of factory owners had full legal protection and the ability to write laws, including laws that gave the death penalty for machine breaking.

Source for this please

> That "someone else" used state power to beat you, imprison you and starve your family if you dared to organize with other workers.

Luddites pre-dated socialism and worker organization. Unless you mean, organizing a terrorist organization to blow up factories.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#526

Post by supertimor »

fnord123 wrote: post #373
raincole wrote: post #211

Luddites in the age of AI don't exist. Until at least some data centers get burned down to the ground, comparing the current anti-AI movement to Luddites is just ridiculous.

Are you aware that the Writer's Guild of America were striking for 4 months against AI doing their jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_... There are also many law suits against AI works: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/books/authors-openai-laws... You really require that they resort to physical violence when they know fully that data in one DC will be backed up elsewhere so it will ha…

Are you really calling a legal strike violence? What options do the working class have left then, if even their legal rights are considered violence? This rhetoric is dangerous and completely anti-worker.

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#527

Post by [deleted] »

birdyrooster wrote: post #518
davidgoudet wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pejorative for you if you are a liberal, for me it is pejorative, I see Luddites as people who damage important parts of production systems and threaten people's lives. I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#528

Post by davidgoudet »

birdyrooster wrote: post #518
davidgoudet wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pejorative for you if you are a liberal, for me it is pejorative, I see Luddites as people who damage important parts of production systems and threaten people's lives. I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#529

Post by supertimor »

czl wrote: post #494
tyg13 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your job was X by hand and now a machine does X better what gives you the right to deny others who want to use such a machine? Self-preservation? Do you expect them to roll over and die? > Did Luddites not feel it was their right to impose costs on others to maintain their way of life? Did the factory owners not feel it was their right to suddenly and massively disrupt the industries that Luddites were making a…

> Self-preservation? Do you expect them to roll over and die? Above I said “A society that leaves members behind will be out competed and replaced by societies that are smarter about this. Ditto for a society that imposes costs on others so that some group can continue to maintain some legacy way of life.” Are these ideas unreasonable? If you think they are good ideas, the rational thing to do is spread them so there…

The Luddite movement came about more due to working condition concerns and factory owners skirting standard labor practices rather than an anti-tech slant. The workers just wanted safe working conditions and fair wages, not to halt progress.

“But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” [1]

“Part of why Ludd could count on such support was that Lt Mellor began by strategically targeting the factories that had the worst records of safety and that paid the lowest wages.” [2]

“Malcolm L. Thomas argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made." [3]

“In the place of a “cottage industry” where clothworkers, often working from home, could work as many or as few hours in the day as suited them, a new institution was arising: the factory. Inside the factory, workers would work long hours at dangerous machinery, be fed meager meals, and submit to the punitive authority of the foreman. The Luddites saw that the winners from this technological “progress” would not be workers—neither the expert textile makers losing their jobs, nor the exploited children replacing them. The winners were the factory owners who, having found a new way to disempower their workers, were able to amass a greater share of the profits those workers generated.” [4]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

[2] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-future-encyclopedia-o...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

[4] https://time.com/6317437/luddites-ai-blood-in-the-machine-me...

Re: Rethinking the Luddites

#530

Post by supertimor »

kortilla wrote: post #322
bfung wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should an enterprise created for profit consider other values than profit? Should an AI created to make paper clips consider other values than making paper clips? https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-pa... Diving all the way down ad absurdum: What's the point of maximizing profit if there are no humans to utilize those profits?

Profit can easily be redistributed. It’s better to have a machine that makes 100 cakes for 100 people with only 2 people working than to employ all 100 people without the machine to make 4 cakes.

But historically, profit has NOT been redistributed. Why would this time be any different?

The people who make the profits have the power to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep from sharing in their profit. This is one of the fears that actually gave rise to the Luddite movement, and so far history has only proven that there is merit to this fear.

When workers brought up these concerns, the factory owners brushed them aside which forced the Luddites to use more extreme measures to be heard like breaking factory machinery. Eventually the wealthy owner class pushed parliament to pass a law that made machine-breaking subject to the death penalty.

“In an attempt to halt or at least make the transition smoother, the Luddites initially sought to renegotiate terms of working conditions based on the changing circumstances in the workplace. Some of the ideas and requests included the introduction of a minimum wage, the adherence of companies to abide by minimum labour standards, and taxes which would enable funds to be created for workers’ pensions. Whilst these terms do not seem unreasonable in the modern day workplace, for the wealthy factory owners, these attempts at bargaining proved futile.

The Luddite movement therefore emerged when attempts at negotiation failed and their valid concerns were not listened to, let alone addressed. “

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-L...

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