Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I. | The New Yorker
This story reviews a novel written by a journalist who argues the period of the Luddites, in the early 19th century, was really about worker’s rights, and not so much about opposition to industrialization and advancement.
The author seems to argue we’d be better off if the Luddites succeeded:
The tragedy of the Luddites is not the fact that they failed to stop industrialization so much as the way in which they failed.
Stopping industrialization would have been good, says the author who wrote his column on a word processor, running on a personal computer, and has his work distributed online, over a global telecommunications network.
The author suggests that a proposed tax on every yard of fabric produced by machines in the early 19th century would have been a good thing.
When the word processor was introduced, it led to the unemployment of many typists, secretaries and administrative assistants whose skills were replaced by technology. But did writers oppose this technology?
Do they view word processing as a bad technology that eliminated jobs and rendered some skills useless?
Should there be a tax based on the number of words produced by writers using word processors, rather than pen or pencil and paper?
Is only some technological advancement bad but its good when it benefits themselves?
The author of the book cited in the above story has a BA in philosophy.
The author of the article has a BA in an undisclosed subject. He apparently dislikes technology – except that which he relies upon himself, such as word processing, the Internet, web servers, smart phones and apps, and so on.
