Angelo Gladding
The Luddites as shock troops for modern industrial capitalism.
00:00
clothworkers: weavers, stocking frame knitters, finishers, croppers, ..
largest industrial workforce
late 1700s, early 1800s
was a "cottage industry", literally working in their own cottages
technologists/craftspeople/mastery
fix/mod their tools to be more productive/efficient
factory, powerloom/wideframe appears
cheaper, poorer quality
drives down sale price of everything
no apprentices
people in the trade begin to see the trends intersecting, industrializing taking shape
10:00
they start protesting
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first to parliament
shoddy is fraudulent
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let's get some regulations on the books
entrepreneurs oppose
no unions, no democracy
post revolutionary France
1811 clothworkers organize in solidarity under ficticious "Ned Ludd"
would seek out and smash new machines, leaving old machines
state sees it as a threat
martials troops, thousands
largest domestic occupation in English history
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at height 30,000 troops ready to fight Luddites
more than had fighting Napoleon
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make it capital offense (hung for smashing a machine)
Lord Byron defends Luddites
still passes
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propaganda campaign
"they know not what they do"
to smash machines, to protest technology, is to be a dummy, to be backwards-looking, to be a Luddite
it's worse for every segment of society except for the one's who own the machines
20:00
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biggest misconception: "they were against technology" NO!
they were against the profits being only beneficial to the few of society
if someone had invented a technology to dramatically improve personal productivity, together it would have been a different story
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proto-capitalism was entering
Luddites fighting against the shock troops of industrial capitalism
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setting up factories at edge of town and employing orphans
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when you hear automation ... it's never a clean automation
there's always an invisible supply chain of usually exploited labor hiding behind it
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these machines are more efficient, it's the future
keep shipping us orphans
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deskilling
labor is more precarious, more vulnerable
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today's AI systems has precarious labor doing quality assurance
pennies payed in Kenya to review training data
not just jobs being automated
good jobs being replaced by bad jobs
who benefits from improvement of technology
industrial/entrepreneurial class was capturing all of the gains
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Luddites were starving as "productivity" was shooting through the roof
Luddism is one of the early efforts to get those two trajectories to align
if you have technology that makes productivity to skyrocket it's trying to get people a seat at the table so that they can benefit too
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it's possible there could have been some kind of new loom technology that actually benefitted everybody
it's not necessarily the new invention, it's how it was put to use, and to what end
it's the social context
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studios want to use AI to write scripts
not as a tool to contribute to writer's creativity
instead to degrade the writer's ability to contribute
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AI will do things better and replace jobs
actually, technology that has been invented, cannot replace a human writer, all it can do is make the product worse
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worried not of writer's job being replaced, worried about studio using [LLM] to barf out draft then assign to someone to rewrite, talk to director, talk to post
you're not the writer, you're the associate producer
it was allowable in writer's contracts, got protections put in place with solidarity of strike
not worried about technology, worried about what companies are going to do with it
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never seen before blunt force apocalyptic hyping of what AI is
still haven't figured out a good way to make money off it
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fight was in hollywood with writers
will happen to copywriters, illustrators, coders, graphic designers
photoshop generative fill is fine
being deployed by management
put into opposition of workers