7 ms·

Hey Ryan! Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were. They were highly

Hey Ryan! Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were. They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just wanted to realize some of the profit from the savings in labor along with the factory owners. When the factory owners said no, the Luddites smashed the new looms. Genuinely, and I'm not trying to ask this with any snark, do you view the work you do as similar to the manufacturers of the auto looms? The opportunity to reduce labor but also further the strength of the owner vs the worker? I could see arguments being made both ways and I'm curious about how your thoughts fall.

gernb 4y ago
what happened with auto looms is cloth became cheap which allowed more people to have clothing and expanded the fashion industry by 1000x Sure glad thse Luddites didn't get their way
- soft_dev_person 4y ago
  I can guess the modern slaves producing our cheap clothes would have an opinion on that.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    It's true that a lot of the fashion industry appears to be pretty disgusting. But that doesn't mean that it would be better if fewer of the steps were automated.
    - MSFT_Edging 4y ago
      Local communities would be stronger and more resilient with more local crafts-people providing meaningful labor within said communities. Currently, everything is extraction and the US is rotting from the inside out because of it.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        People can do that right now; they just choose not to. I don't think you can do simple moralising at the state of things and point the blame at a single cause.
      - colinmhayes 4y ago
        Or people would consume less and therefore be poorer.
- vidarh 4y ago
  So you read the comment which specifically made the argument that they didn't want to prevent the new looms from being used and concluded that they wanted to prevent the new looms from being used?
- bamboozled 4y ago
  It's probably also opened up a whole niche market for artisan "handwoven" fabrics. Sadly that's probably a modern thing and not something that people wanted / cared about immediately once everyone lost their jobs.
justshowpost 4y ago
[flagged]
dmix 4y ago
What alternative are you suggesting? Things turned out pretty great economy-wise for people in the UK. So that's a poor example even if Luddites didn't hate technology. Not working on the technology wouldn't have done the world any favours (nor the millions of people who wore the more affordable clothes it produced). I personally think it'd be rewarding to make developers lives easier, essentially just saving the countless hours we spend googling + copy/pasting Stackoverflow answers. Co-pilot is merely just one project in this technological development, even if a mega-corp like Microsoft doesn't do it ML is here to stay. If you're concerned that software developers job security is at all at risk from co-pilot than you greatly misunderstand how software engineering works. Auto-completing a few functions you'd copy/paste otherwise (or rewrite for the hundredth time) is a small part of building a piece of software. If they struggle with self-driving cars, I think you'll be alright. At the end-of-the-day there's a big incentive for Github et al to solve this problem, a class action lawsuit is always an overhanging threat. Even if co-pilot doesn't make sense as a business and these pushback shut it down I doubt it will go away. I'm personally confident the industry will eventually figure out the licensing issues. The industry will develop better automated detection systems and if it requires more explicit flagging, no-one is better positioned to apply that technologically than Github.
- krageon 4y ago
  The luddites were right. Everything is worse because they did not win, which is obvious if you spend a second thinking about what them not winning means: more concentrated wealth, more disenfranchised workers.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    Yet the public narrative centers around perceived anti-technologism and implied anti-comfortism, wholly ignoring the societal underpinnings of the issue: an increase in power and income inequality amounting to disenfranchisement.
CrimsonRain 4y ago
The Luddites can use auto looms on their own and be their own owners. Labor force wants salary + profit but entirely missing from accepting loss. Funny stuff.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  "risk" -_-' Because no private business has ever been bailed out or received any public funding, right?
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Yes, that is also bad. Public bodies choosing to give private companies money because otherwise they'd fail is bad stewardship of our taxes. But also this point is silly. Plenty of money and effort is risked and lost with no bailout. Bailouts are extremely unusual in the grand scheme of things.
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      Not rarer than bankrupcy.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        Are you sure? According to Statistica there were over 700k bankruptcies in the US from 2000-2020 [0]. How many bailouts have there been? [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/817918/number-of-business-bankruptcies-in-the-united-states https://www.statista.com/statistics/817918/number-of-busines...
        LtWorf 4y ago
        A lot more. For example, but not only: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15639-trump-covid-19-sba-loans.html https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15639-trump-covid-19-sba-l...
robertlagrant 4y ago
But - the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us. Similarly, the reason Europe put 30% of its populace "out of work" by industrialising agriculture is why we don't have to all go work in fields all day. It is a massive net positive for us all. Moving ice from the arctic into America quickly enough before it melted was a big industry. The refrigerator put paid to that, and improved lives the world over. Monks retained knowledge through careful copying and retransmission of knowledge during the medieval times in the UK. That knowledge was foundational in the incredible acceleration of development in the UK and neighbouring countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the printing press, that rendered those monks much less relevant to culture and academia, was still a very good idea that we all still benefit from today. Soon, millions of car mechanics who specialise in ICE engines will have to retrain or, possibly, just be made redundant. That may be required for us to reduce our pollution output by a few percent globally, and we may well need to do that. The exact moment in history when workers who've learned how to do one job are rendered obsolete is painful, yes, and they are well within their rights to what they can to retain a living. But that doesn't mean those workers are somehow right; nor that all subsequent generations should have to delay or forego the life improvement that a useful advance brings, nor all of the advances that would be built on that advance.
- latexr 4y ago
  > the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Stealing, scamming, gambling, inheriting, collecting interest, price gouging, slavery, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors… Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else. > Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us. We don’t need all that clothing, made by monetarily exploiting people in poor countries and sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”. The usefulness line has long been crossed, it’s about profit profit profit.
  - 4y ago
krab 4y ago
While an interesting take, it doesn't apply directly. In my opinion, the situation is more similar to search engines bringing you code snippets - they shouldn't be stripped of their original licenses. At least that's the legal framework we used to operate in. Sure the legal framework can change, but such profound change will have surely many consequences we won't foresee, for good or bad.
carom 4y ago
I am violently opposed to copilot and it has nothing to do with feeling threatened. I would gladly use a model whose weights were open sourced or proprietary that paid for its training material.

gernb 4y ago

what happened with auto looms is cloth became cheap which allowed more people to have clothing and expanded the fashion industry by 1000x Sure glad thse Luddites didn't get their way

soft_dev_person 4y ago
I can guess the modern slaves producing our cheap clothes would have an opinion on that.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  It's true that a lot of the fashion industry appears to be pretty disgusting. But that doesn't mean that it would be better if fewer of the steps were automated.
  - MSFT_Edging 4y ago
    Local communities would be stronger and more resilient with more local crafts-people providing meaningful labor within said communities. Currently, everything is extraction and the US is rotting from the inside out because of it.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      People can do that right now; they just choose not to. I don't think you can do simple moralising at the state of things and point the blame at a single cause.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      Or people would consume less and therefore be poorer.
vidarh 4y ago
So you read the comment which specifically made the argument that they didn't want to prevent the new looms from being used and concluded that they wanted to prevent the new looms from being used?
bamboozled 4y ago
It's probably also opened up a whole niche market for artisan "handwoven" fabrics. Sadly that's probably a modern thing and not something that people wanted / cared about immediately once everyone lost their jobs.

justshowpost 4y ago

[flagged]

dmix 4y ago

What alternative are you suggesting? Things turned out pretty great economy-wise for people in the UK. So that's a poor example even if Luddites didn't hate technology. Not working on the technology wouldn't have done the world any favours (nor the millions of people who wore the more affordable clothes it produced). I personally think it'd be rewarding to make developers lives easier, essentially just saving the countless hours we spend googling + copy/pasting Stackoverflow answers. Co-pilot is merely just one project in this technological development, even if a mega-corp like Microsoft doesn't do it ML is here to stay. If you're concerned that software developers job security is at all at risk from co-pilot than you greatly misunderstand how software engineering works. Auto-completing a few functions you'd copy/paste otherwise (or rewrite for the hundredth time) is a small part of building a piece of software. If they struggle with self-driving cars, I think you'll be alright. At the end-of-the-day there's a big incentive for Github et al to solve this problem, a class action lawsuit is always an overhanging threat. Even if co-pilot doesn't make sense as a business and these pushback shut it down I doubt it will go away. I'm personally confident the industry will eventually figure out the licensing issues. The industry will develop better automated detection systems and if it requires more explicit flagging, no-one is better positioned to apply that technologically than Github.

krageon 4y ago
The luddites were right. Everything is worse because they did not win, which is obvious if you spend a second thinking about what them not winning means: more concentrated wealth, more disenfranchised workers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Yet the public narrative centers around perceived anti-technologism and implied anti-comfortism, wholly ignoring the societal underpinnings of the issue: an increase in power and income inequality amounting to disenfranchisement.

CrimsonRain 4y ago

The Luddites can use auto looms on their own and be their own owners. Labor force wants salary + profit but entirely missing from accepting loss. Funny stuff.

LtWorf 4y ago
"risk" -_-' Because no private business has ever been bailed out or received any public funding, right?
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Yes, that is also bad. Public bodies choosing to give private companies money because otherwise they'd fail is bad stewardship of our taxes. But also this point is silly. Plenty of money and effort is risked and lost with no bailout. Bailouts are extremely unusual in the grand scheme of things.
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    Not rarer than bankrupcy.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Are you sure? According to Statistica there were over 700k bankruptcies in the US from 2000-2020 [0]. How many bailouts have there been? [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/817918/number-of-business-bankruptcies-in-the-united-states https://www.statista.com/statistics/817918/number-of-busines...
      - LtWorf 4y ago
        A lot more. For example, but not only: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15639-trump-covid-19-sba-loans.html https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15639-trump-covid-19-sba-l...

robertlagrant 4y ago

But - the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us. Similarly, the reason Europe put 30% of its populace "out of work" by industrialising agriculture is why we don't have to all go work in fields all day. It is a massive net positive for us all. Moving ice from the arctic into America quickly enough before it melted was a big industry. The refrigerator put paid to that, and improved lives the world over. Monks retained knowledge through careful copying and retransmission of knowledge during the medieval times in the UK. That knowledge was foundational in the incredible acceleration of development in the UK and neighbouring countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the printing press, that rendered those monks much less relevant to culture and academia, was still a very good idea that we all still benefit from today. Soon, millions of car mechanics who specialise in ICE engines will have to retrain or, possibly, just be made redundant. That may be required for us to reduce our pollution output by a few percent globally, and we may well need to do that. The exact moment in history when workers who've learned how to do one job are rendered obsolete is painful, yes, and they are well within their rights to what they can to retain a living. But that doesn't mean those workers are somehow right; nor that all subsequent generations should have to delay or forego the life improvement that a useful advance brings, nor all of the advances that would be built on that advance.

latexr 4y ago
> the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Stealing, scamming, gambling, inheriting, collecting interest, price gouging, slavery, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors… Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else. > Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us. We don’t need all that clothing, made by monetarily exploiting people in poor countries and sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”. The usefulness line has long been crossed, it’s about profit profit profit.
- 4y ago

krab 4y ago

While an interesting take, it doesn't apply directly. In my opinion, the situation is more similar to search engines bringing you code snippets - they shouldn't be stripped of their original licenses. At least that's the legal framework we used to operate in. Sure the legal framework can change, but such profound change will have surely many consequences we won't foresee, for good or bad.

carom 4y ago

I am violently opposed to copilot and it has nothing to do with feeling threatened. I would gladly use a model whose weights were open sourced or proprietary that paid for its training material.