I haven’t worked in a furniture factory but I have assembled car seats in a factory for Toyota.
The difference matters because the people who worked together to smash the looms created the myth of Ned Ludd to protect their identities from persecution. They used organized violence because they had no leverage otherwise to demand fair wages, safety guarantees, and other labour protections. What they were fighting for wasn’t the abolishment of automation and looms. It was for social reforms that would have given them labour protections.
It matters today because AI isn’t a profit line on any balance sheet right now but it is being used to justify mass layoffs and to reduce the leverage of knowledge workers in the marketplace. These tools steal your work without compensation and replace your job with capital so that rent seekers can seek rent.
It’s not a repeat of what happened in the Luddite protests but history is rhyming.
We agree, which makes me question your original point with the power tool somehow being different even more. Every automation gives more leverage to capital over labour. That's the history of technology. Downstream it makes this great life with indoor plumbing etc possible but automation in any form will always erode skilled labourers as a class. It's all essentially the same in that regard.
The introduction of looms wasn’t what displaced workers.
It was capitalists seeking profits by reducing the power of labour to negotiate.
We didn’t mass layoff carpenters once we had power tools and automation.
We had more carpenters.
Just like we had more programmers once we invented compilers and higher level languages.
LLMs just aren’t like power tools. Most programming tools aren’t like power tools.
Programming languages might be close to being “power tools,” as they fit in the “centaur” category. I could write the assembly by hand or write the bash scripts that deploy my VMs in the cloud. But instead I can write a program, give it to a compiler, and it will generate the code for me.
LLM generated code fits in the reverse-centaur category. I’m giving it instructions and context but I’m not doing the work. It is. My labour is to feed the machine and deliver its output. If there was a way to remove me from that loop, you bet I’d be out of a job in a heartbeat.
The difference matters because the people who worked together to smash the looms created the myth of Ned Ludd to protect their identities from persecution. They used organized violence because they had no leverage otherwise to demand fair wages, safety guarantees, and other labour protections. What they were fighting for wasn’t the abolishment of automation and looms. It was for social reforms that would have given them labour protections.
It matters today because AI isn’t a profit line on any balance sheet right now but it is being used to justify mass layoffs and to reduce the leverage of knowledge workers in the marketplace. These tools steal your work without compensation and replace your job with capital so that rent seekers can seek rent.
It’s not a repeat of what happened in the Luddite protests but history is rhyming.