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Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy

#1612 New Tech and the New Luddite Movement; Inequitable Distribution of Benefits from New Technology Always Sparks Demands from Labor and AI is Rekindling the Old Arguments

Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy

Jay Tomlinson

Marx, Political, Feminism, Jacobin, Left, Hightower, Politics, Counterspin, News, News Commentary, Maddow, Hartmann, Democracynow, Antiracism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, Ezra, Liberal, Intercepted, Hayes, Progressive, Intercept, Intersectionality, Wolff

4.63.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Air Date 2/20/2024

"Luddite" should never have become the epithet that it is as the Luddites were never afraid of or opposed to technological advancement, they only opposed the exploitation of workers and the degradation to society that came with the unfair distribution of the benefits of the targeted technology.

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Transcript

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SHOW NOTES

Ch. 1: The New Luddites - SHIFT - Air Date 2-14-24

Activists are fighting back against generative AI and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process, says Brian Merchant in a new piece for The Atlantic.

Ch. 2: Being a Luddite Is Good, Actually ft. Jathan Sadowski - Left Reckoning - Air Date 5-29-21

Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) of the This Machine Kills (@machinekillspod) podcast repairs our sabotaged understanding of the legacy of the Luddites.

Ch. 3: Why this top AI guru thinks we might be in extinction-level trouble | The InnerView - TRT World - Air Date 1-22-24

Lauded for his groundbreaking work in reverse-engineering OpenAI's large language model, GPT-2, AI expert Connor Leahy tells Imran Garda why he is now sounding the alarm.

SEE FULL SHOW NOTES


FINAL COMMENTS

Ch. 12: Final comments on the fork in the road and a look at our options

References:

Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.

A Scottish Jewish joke - Things Fall Apart - Air Date 1-25-22


MUSIC (Blue Dot Sessions)

SHOW IMAGE:

Description: An 1812 block print of “The Leader of the Luddites” depicting a man in disheveled early 1800s clothing and missing one shoe leading other men up a hill while a building burns in the background.

Credit: “The Leader of the Luddites”, Messrs | Working Class Movement Library catalog | Public Domain

Produced by Jay! Tomlinson

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:15.2

opposed to technological advancement they only oppose the exploitation of

0:19.6

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

0:27.0

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

0:35.0

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

0:40.8

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

0:47.4

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

1:00.0

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

1:07.7

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

1:16.1

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

1:22.1

automation,

1:23.4

found themselves with their backs against the walls.

1:25.6

Tech companies of the day, entrepreneurs of the day,

1:28.4

were using machines that automated work

1:30.7

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

1:36.6

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

1:39.8

that smashing the machines that were taking their jobs.

1:43.8

They organized around this fictitious apocryphal sort of figure,

1:49.1

Ned Ludd, who was probably just completely made up

1:52.1

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

2:06.7

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

2:10.8

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

...

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