Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50191250

Points: 27

# Comments: 12

He was anti: - Machinery replacing handicraft (skill disappeared and poverty followed) - Labor-saving machines replacing human workers (workers became expendable) - Doctors replacing consequences (people lost self-control) - Railways replacing constraint and slowness (harm spread faster)

But he loved the sewing machine.

Gandhi’s test for whether to accept tech-driven change was whether it satisfied primary needs. Interpretation of those needs was certainly not universal. As he wrote: "...it is not the primary need of man to traverse distances with the rapidity of a motor car. The needle on the contrary happens to be an essential thing in life, a primary need.”

That's the airplane in this post. Excitement or fear of the AI airplane is either judged as helping mathematicians (sewing machine) or doing something not quite right (the above machinery/doctor/railway)...

My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?

Related, I've moved to requiring regular in-class handwritten quizzes. Just a blank piece of paper to start, with the questions on the board. The practice forces students to recognize whether they are learning specific topics.

When it comes to revolting against industry change, there's a good paper by Eric Hobsbawm called The Machine Breakers. Yes, he's focused more on the Luddite-style reaction of destruction. But interestingly, he notes two types of machine breaking.

There is the type that is not hostile to the machine itself, but which was used to coerce employers to improve conditions and pay. Unpopular employers and owners were often the ones targeted with what has been called “collective bargaining by riot.” Those machine breakers were more pro trade-unionist than anti-machine.

Hobsbawm mentions that a benefit of machine breaking was that destruction built the “habit of solidarity which is the foundation of effective trade unionism.” That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered.

But the second type of machine breaking was more about resistance to machines themselves, especially those that were labor-saving devices. That type of anti-tech Luddism is where I’ve mostly focused my own recent research. For that second type, Hobsbawm notes that workers, manufacturers, and the general public often shared in the discomfort of machine impact on peoples’ livelihoods.

Unlike the conditions and pay, this other type of machine-breaking helped workers slow down the loss of control on their employment. That included situations where machines made workers more productive and where, as a result, fewer of them were required. Or situations where machines enabled pay to decrease, as highly-skilled and highly-paid workers were replaced by less-skilled and lower-paid workers.

The alternative was the impossibility that Hobsbawm describes as follows: “The small shop-keeper or local master did not want an economy of limitless expansion…. His ideal was the secular dream of all 'little men,' … a small- scale society of modest property-owners and comfortably-off wage- earners, without great distinctions of wealth of power.”

I'm due to update this, but I've been keeping a running list of examples: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.

In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.

Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.

But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.

Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.

You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).

No more nuclear duck and cover drills; no more fallout shelters scattered around cities.

Look at the history of that clock and tell me if you think it's a useful timepiece.

Maybe this is a bit, but just a bit, better (though backward looking): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+bomb%2Cnuc...

In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."

In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.

This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.

In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.

Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.

There's a Chinese idiom: 生不逢时 "to be born at the wrong time." The story was about a man who, when young, lived in a peaceful kingdom (they needed older men then). Then, when he was old, he lived in a kingdom at war (they needed young men then). You can't choose when you are born or what environment you are born into.

I also wonder what it would be like to be this age in, say, the year 2226 and to think "hey, I could have been a great mathematician if I had been born 200+ years earlier!" Or to think, "hey, if I had been born 500 years earlier I would have been a great explorer."

Do what you can with the time you are in. It will go by just as fast.

That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?".

Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48244770

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

For me when I teach, no laptops or phones in class along with in-class handwritten paper quizzes on course readings and concepts has helped a lot.