It’s worth remembering the meaning of the luddites doesn’t lie in the fact that some of them were skilled machinists, somehow reluctant to rebel against the tech of the day. It’s that they smashed machines in an act of collective bargaining by riot
.
Emphasising a lack of antipathy towards machinery is, in part, an example of the victors writing history: it seems absurd for our heroes to counter the sweep of progress. But “progress” only reveals itself when the spoils have been divided, and what happened interpreted into history.
I mention this because I’ve read a couple of toots and blog posts recently that emphasise this lack of antipathy toward the tech of the day and, by extension, the tech of this day, whether that’s LLMs, what we generally term AI, or, more broadly, any computing machine.
In fact, hating the machines could be quite rational, and in many ways healthy.
A note on providing examples
I’m normally pretty good when it comes to collecting examples when I’m drafting a blog post, but I seem to have neglected my duty on this occasion. Apologies — I appreciate I run the risk of creating a straw man here.
If our starting point is that the tech itself is neutral in its effects, or could be benign if put to use in the correct way by the correct people, we are placed on the back foot when it comes to criticising its current and real effects.
Firstly, we have to waste time in prepending our argument with a to be clear, I’m not anti-tech per se disclaimer. Rhetorically, this dilutes what we want to say, and frames it as a minority, unpopular and uninstinctive opinion.
This becomes particularly counter-productive when we try and demonstrate our pro-tech position by outlining a potentially appropriate use of, say, an LLM, or a time we’ve found some utility in one at work or something.
More fundamentally, this strikes me as an inversion of the proper relationship between us and tech. By asserting we’re not antagonistic towards tech we confer it a status as a thing worthy of respect, existing in and of itself. In fact we could argue that the current AI hype is at heart an attempt to push tech up the ontological table toward human status.
Techno-optimism could not exist without this basic belief in tech’s very existence. Without it, we have to see “tech” as a set of — mostly harmful — relationships and effects visited on groups of people by other people; in short, a means to exercise power in increasingly inimical ways.
When we consider the history of modern tech, we see that its use has more often than not been for military purposes, a cybernetic move to reduce everyone and everything to code
. When we see the tech categorising, making life-changing decisions about and ultimately dehumanising and killing people, it’s rational to hate it.
As Audrey Watters writes certainly we must resist the teleology that positions these technologies always and forever thus
, and that means making history rather than accepting the narrative that tech is inevitable, and writing it in advance, where the tech has won. That means not starting your articles with assertions such as AI is here to stay
, or qualifying your criticisms with I accept there is a good use for AI, but…