The Luddites Were Right To Fear
When fear of technology is valid and what we can do about it
Progress cannot be stopped. Someone will always be building the next technology that will save time and money at the expense of the breadwinners and boot-strappers. These advances provide wonderful benefits, but everything has a cost.
That cost will be paid soonest by the truck drivers and the coal shovelers of today, who will not be able to compete with the machines being dreamed up by some of the smartest minds this world has to offer. We are on the edge of another great industrial revolution: one where the common man is even less a part of the guts of industry than before.
This has all happened before. The Luddites tried to stop it, and failed.
The Luddites were the biggest armed resistance against industrialization in the 1800s. They were the weavers, the cloth makers, the spinners, and the shearers—respectable people who made decidedly respectable wages. They were the weavers who smashed machine doing their jobs better and faster than they ever could.
The Luddites were right to be afraid.
When those first instruments of industrialization were destroyed, the Luddites were acting in their own rational self interest. Progress would not be kind to these people and they could see that. Production would increase but the quality of their lives would plummet. People of the working class would be relegated to dirty dangerous factories, making a fraction of what they once earned. Simultaneously wealth would become increasingly stratified so that a comparative few truly enjoyed the fruits of these labors.
We make fun of the Luddites, but their lives were not made better by the increased technology. Rights for factory workers would not begin to catch on for another hundred years.
The Luddites were marching up to the doors of a factory in 1812 that was symbol of their professional—and financial—demise. They would not succeed, and mechanized weaving would continue on without them. It is easy to look back at these people and see the folly of backwards bumpkins who thought they could crush to pieces the mechanization of their industry. But these were people defending their livelihoods from the coming scourge of mechanization. Industrialization would not like a dragon that Sir George or whoever slew in days of old, this was a mountain that would crush you blithely unless you got out of its way.
Even if the weavers had succeeded in smashing these machines into expensive junk; they were still going to lose to time. The cloth would be made far away from the reach of their hammers, and sold cheap to their neighbors.
They were right to fear.
Our society has a choice.
We don’t live in 1812, and our shiny inventions come with an increased ability to deal with our problems. This new modern age also does things like track unemployment figures and a government that theoretically tries to minimize the suffering of its citizens.
The coming tech revolution can either be met with futile attempts to smash progress into pieces or with compassion and forethought. To move forward our society has the capacity to take care of the people who have the most reason to fear the outmoding of their trade. This compassion can take the form of a basic income and training programs for new more technologically advanced careers. Such compassion will not be a handout, but the earned reward of generations making every aspect of our economy more efficient.
How our culture handles the next generation of technology has the potential to be one of its greatest achievements. If we mess it up this time the consequences will be dire.
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