top | item 46963392

(no title)

jonas21 | 19 days ago

> If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible.

Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.

discuss

order

goatlover|19 days ago

Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership class. Depends on which side of the story you want to tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical propaganda.

Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.

reactordev|19 days ago

Reaganomics has never worked

r_lee|19 days ago

problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)

I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.

so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.

toprerules|19 days ago

If the human race is wiped out by global warming I'm not so sure I would agree with this statement. Technology rarely fails to have downsides that are only discovered in hindsight IMO.

imtringued|18 days ago

If you knew a little bit about history then you would know that the "Anti-Luddite" position is literally "shoot the unemployed if they strike".

Equivocating Luddites with backwards thinking is a way to cover up government violence. You're literally trying to misrepresent the Luddite position by implying that they had some sort of global plot to force the world to be worse and that they were rightfully stopped by the government when in reality they had some personal grievances about how they were treated and they took revenge against the owners of capital by vandalizing their capital.

You're trying to twist this into Luddites hating capital and machinery itself, which is factually wrong.

harimau777|19 days ago

Sure, but would it have been better or worse for the Luddites?

iso1631|19 days ago

For those who survived sure. For those at the time, I'm sure they would disagree