Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast in which we take a look at why Luddite should never have become the epithet that it is as Luddites were never afraid of or

opposed to technological advancement they only oppose the exploitation of

workers and the degradation to society that came with the unfair distribution of the benefits of the targeted

technology, which is echoed in the debate over AI and its impact on the future of work today.

Sources today include Shift, Left Reckoning, TRT World, J-Stubes on Tik-T-T-T-T-T-T-World,

J-Subes on Tic-Doc, Factually, Torres, and the majority report with additional

members-only clips from Factually and Alice Capel. The Luddites were a band of rebels, basically,

cloth workers in the beginning stages of the Industrial Revolution who after trying

various peaceful measures for a long long time to make sure that their working lives and their identities and their

trades were protected from the March of what we would refer to today as

automation,

found themselves with their backs against the walls.

Tech companies of the day, entrepreneurs of the day,

were using machines that automated work

that sort of did their jobs, worseier and more cheaply changed course and they

started fighting and they started doing the thing that would come to define them

that smashing the machines that were taking their jobs.

They organized around this fictitious apocryphal sort of figure,

Ned Ludd, who was probably just completely made up

or may have been an apprentice cloth worker who wasn't working as best as his master wanted him to so he his master had him whipped and he enraged, took a giant hammer and smashed the machine that he

had been working on, fled into Sherwood Forest like Robin Hood before him.

They were both in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire and sort of the legend. him.

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