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For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently. We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people t

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently. We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people throughout history have been adamantly against the rapid progress of technology. The Luddites are the most famous group but there have been lots more. Even if you ignore those people for being frankly a bit weird, the driving force behind technology for the first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive. Those were definitely noble goals. Compare that to the past 200 or so years and much of the progress has been about the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few extraordinarily rich people. The technological gains have been spread widely, sure, but they've come at a high cost. That's different to the past where the gains have come with very little cost. We could transform society to benefit everyone using technology if we wanted to. I suspect we won't though. We'll sell a few AI powered gadgets to the masses, and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people. That's not really much of a win.

renewiltord 3y ago
I think that's wholesale falsehood. The wins in the last 200 years are so dramatic for the average person, especially in the West. Infant mortality rate and the chance of survival to adulthood alone are such glorious victories against Death that I would gladly vote for any system that would give us those wins and create a trillionaire. All that wondrous science has come from this system. No. Evidence is evidence. This thing works, and works dramatically well. We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. My wife and I noticed this the other day. They fought wars back in the day for a fraction of the spices that I buy ethically today. No retvrn. Forward only.
- acjohnson55 3y ago
  At the scale of 200 years, you have some absolutely staggering human atrocities, fueled by technology. Colonialism, modern warfare, carpet bombing/nukes, industrialized genocide, truly ghastly urban factory life. We can maybe look at the past few decades as the point at which most of the world finally began to enjoy the effects of the industrial revolution. Although the cost may be the collapse of the carrying capacity of the earth for humans and many, many other species. There's maybe a world in which we select for the biggest wins for human lifespan, like modern medicine, and filter out the parts that are destructive. But that's not the world we live in.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    It is possible, in this world, for you to move to a less civilized part of the world and emulate the life of 200 years ago. We can have both if we so desire. But your children will almost all die before they see 5 winters. Behave in line with your convictions if you so desire.
    - adrianovaroli 3y ago
      You do understand that the countries "stuck in the life of 200 years ago" aren't stuck there just because they don't want to go on, right? Right? Colonization and resource extraction were a thing.
- onion2k 3y ago
  We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. Some of us do. If you're at the poorer end of society things are still pretty damn bleak. People live with long term treatable illness. People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. Sure, those of us who can afford them have lots of shiny gadgets that save us from a bit of manual labor, but that's not really worth much if stepping outside of your front door means you're scared of being mugged. I'm not saying I'd give any of it up. Hell no. I'm saying that a few less rockets and a few more homeless shelters might go some way to helping balance things out a little.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    > Some of us do Almost every single one of us does. The great, huge, gigantic majority of us does. Few realize it though.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > People live with long term treatable illness. None of what were treatable at the 1800. > People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. In relative terms, almost none. I'm not sure how they compare in absolute terms, but just the answer not being obvious while the population increased by an order of magnitude already makes your claim quite bad. > People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. And nobody had no prospect back them. You can complain that there are some people living almost as badly as people lived in the 1800s. But it's not the majority by far, and you can't claim they are currently living worse. And, of course, none of that is reason to not demand better things.
    - helboi4 3y ago
      As many have pointed out, technological advancement is pointless without social advancement. We have learnt how to treat diseases 10 times over at this point, and yet people still live with them. That is a failure at engineering our social system. Social change is the decisive factor. Technological change without social change is just giving the rich new ways to subjugate or ignore the poor.
- miguelazo 3y ago
  >This thing works, and works dramatically well Really? It has produced a climate destabilization that may well destroy civilization within the next decade or two.
akprasad 3y ago
The Luddites were not anti-technology per se. Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1]. Given the rest of your comment, it seems the Luddites are your natural allies. Related HN discussion on [1] from 3 weeks ago: [2] [1]: https://archive.ph/ZUiC7 https://archive.ph/ZUiC7 ("Rethinking the Luddites," The New Yorker) [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37664682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37664682
- aa1234556 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  > Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1] I find discussions about the Luddites online to be deeply illustrative not of the Luddites themselves but of a person's political beliefs. The Luddites did indeed fight for their community and livelihood, but theirs came by dismantling another one. For hundreds of years prior the textiles trade was dominated by the Mughal Empire. British colonization in South Asia, fed by a multitude of factors including industrialization, dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market and eventually catapulted British textile production to the world stage. This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. The Luddites then did not want to turn back the textile market fully back to a world dominated by South Asia but into the middle where they owned the means of production. Accelerationists view Luddites as obstructionists. Labor sympanthizers view Luddites as a movement for labor protections. The wider view of history paints a more subtle picture.
  - KaiserPro 3y ago
    > dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market That doesn't happen until after the luddite's first appearance in ~1816 [1] > This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against. Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards. Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight. The concept of high minded observations on empire are anachronistic embellishments[2]. The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground. I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then. The wool trade supplied wealth to large parts of the cotswolds, east anglia, the lowlands and other places. The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500. [1] https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/25347/0000794.pdf?sequence=1 https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/2534... page 39, turning point is 1830 [2] https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/ned-ludd-1812.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/ne... They are literally talking about powered frames, and nothing else.
hotnfresh 3y ago
He literally cites not-recent examples (and his list is far from exhaustive) of technological skepticism in the paragraph right before. You can rebut that silly claim with his own text, you don’t even need to reach beyond it.
pseudotrash 3y ago
> and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people "Alwsys has been Moon guy gets shot in the back" meme ... seriously this has been documented over and over most prominently and especially in Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
tech_ken 3y ago
> the driving force behind technology for the first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive This seems naive to me (setting aside the issue of even defining or identifying "the driving force behind technology"). The Romans were famously engineering-minded and they certainly weren't doing it just for the improvement of the human condition; it had material and political consequences which they wanted to see realized. From my understanding of history this is true in pretty much any era and any location throughout history. Certainly there have always been people inventing new tools for the fun of it, or to improve their and others' lives, but it's not at all clear to me how you could show that the balance between these motivations has shifted so dramatically only in the last ~200 years. It seems far more plausible (to me) that technological development has always been a fulcrum for accumulation of wealth and power, and that our current moment is better explained as a shift in whose wealth and power is benefited (kings and emperors replaced by multinational corps and capital owners), rather than a complete reorientation of the nature of technology itself.

renewiltord 3y ago

I think that's wholesale falsehood. The wins in the last 200 years are so dramatic for the average person, especially in the West. Infant mortality rate and the chance of survival to adulthood alone are such glorious victories against Death that I would gladly vote for any system that would give us those wins and create a trillionaire. All that wondrous science has come from this system. No. Evidence is evidence. This thing works, and works dramatically well. We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. My wife and I noticed this the other day. They fought wars back in the day for a fraction of the spices that I buy ethically today. No retvrn. Forward only.

acjohnson55 3y ago
At the scale of 200 years, you have some absolutely staggering human atrocities, fueled by technology. Colonialism, modern warfare, carpet bombing/nukes, industrialized genocide, truly ghastly urban factory life. We can maybe look at the past few decades as the point at which most of the world finally began to enjoy the effects of the industrial revolution. Although the cost may be the collapse of the carrying capacity of the earth for humans and many, many other species. There's maybe a world in which we select for the biggest wins for human lifespan, like modern medicine, and filter out the parts that are destructive. But that's not the world we live in.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  It is possible, in this world, for you to move to a less civilized part of the world and emulate the life of 200 years ago. We can have both if we so desire. But your children will almost all die before they see 5 winters. Behave in line with your convictions if you so desire.
  - adrianovaroli 3y ago
    You do understand that the countries "stuck in the life of 200 years ago" aren't stuck there just because they don't want to go on, right? Right? Colonization and resource extraction were a thing.
onion2k 3y ago
We live like Gods compared to people of the 1800s. Some of us do. If you're at the poorer end of society things are still pretty damn bleak. People live with long term treatable illness. People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. Sure, those of us who can afford them have lots of shiny gadgets that save us from a bit of manual labor, but that's not really worth much if stepping outside of your front door means you're scared of being mugged. I'm not saying I'd give any of it up. Hell no. I'm saying that a few less rockets and a few more homeless shelters might go some way to helping balance things out a little.
- nickpp 3y ago
  > Some of us do Almost every single one of us does. The great, huge, gigantic majority of us does. Few realize it though.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > People live with long term treatable illness. None of what were treatable at the 1800. > People don't have basic necessities like shelter or food or water. In relative terms, almost none. I'm not sure how they compare in absolute terms, but just the answer not being obvious while the population increased by an order of magnitude already makes your claim quite bad. > People live with very little prospect of escaping a life of drudgery. And nobody had no prospect back them. You can complain that there are some people living almost as badly as people lived in the 1800s. But it's not the majority by far, and you can't claim they are currently living worse. And, of course, none of that is reason to not demand better things.
  - helboi4 3y ago
    As many have pointed out, technological advancement is pointless without social advancement. We have learnt how to treat diseases 10 times over at this point, and yet people still live with them. That is a failure at engineering our social system. Social change is the decisive factor. Technological change without social change is just giving the rich new ways to subjugate or ignore the poor.
miguelazo 3y ago
>This thing works, and works dramatically well Really? It has produced a climate destabilization that may well destroy civilization within the next decade or two.

akprasad 3y ago

The Luddites were not anti-technology per se. Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1]. Given the rest of your comment, it seems the Luddites are your natural allies. Related HN discussion on [1] from 3 weeks ago: [2] [1]: https://archive.ph/ZUiC7 https://archive.ph/ZUiC7 ("Rethinking the Luddites," The New Yorker) [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37664682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37664682

aa1234556 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
> Rather, they were against an unequal distribution of that technology because it was destroying their community and livelihood, precisely because that technology concentrated power in the hands of the capital class [1] I find discussions about the Luddites online to be deeply illustrative not of the Luddites themselves but of a person's political beliefs. The Luddites did indeed fight for their community and livelihood, but theirs came by dismantling another one. For hundreds of years prior the textiles trade was dominated by the Mughal Empire. British colonization in South Asia, fed by a multitude of factors including industrialization, dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market and eventually catapulted British textile production to the world stage. This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. The Luddites then did not want to turn back the textile market fully back to a world dominated by South Asia but into the middle where they owned the means of production. Accelerationists view Luddites as obstructionists. Labor sympanthizers view Luddites as a movement for labor protections. The wider view of history paints a more subtle picture.
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  > dismantled the subcontinent's dominant position in the market That doesn't happen until after the luddite's first appearance in ~1816 [1] > This created the skilled textile jobs that were eventually mechanized and displaced. No, The displacement is what the Luddites were railing against. Weavers had been highly paid, profitable and skilled occupation from the "dark ages" onwards. Technological advances meant that they were ruined almost overnight. The concept of high minded observations on empire are anachronistic embellishments[2]. The weavers just weaved, the merchants sourced the raw materials. the concept that the average weaver knew the conditions, circumstance, much less people that produced it is on very shaky ground. I suspect that given that the producers were Christian, much less protestant, would have meant that sympathy would have been limited. Given how xenophobic people were back then. The wool trade supplied wealth to large parts of the cotswolds, east anglia, the lowlands and other places. The weaver's guilds had a hand in various wars, revolutions and many other social developments between 1100 and at least 1500. [1] https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/25347/0000794.pdf?sequence=1 https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/2534... page 39, turning point is 1830 [2] https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/ned-ludd-1812.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/ne... They are literally talking about powered frames, and nothing else.

hotnfresh 3y ago

He literally cites not-recent examples (and his list is far from exhaustive) of technological skepticism in the paragraph right before. You can rebut that silly claim with his own text, you don’t even need to reach beyond it.

pseudotrash 3y ago

> and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people "Alwsys has been Moon guy gets shot in the back" meme ... seriously this has been documented over and over most prominently and especially in Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

tech_ken 3y ago

> the driving force behind technology for the first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive This seems naive to me (setting aside the issue of even defining or identifying "the driving force behind technology"). The Romans were famously engineering-minded and they certainly weren't doing it just for the improvement of the human condition; it had material and political consequences which they wanted to see realized. From my understanding of history this is true in pretty much any era and any location throughout history. Certainly there have always been people inventing new tools for the fun of it, or to improve their and others' lives, but it's not at all clear to me how you could show that the balance between these motivations has shifted so dramatically only in the last ~200 years. It seems far more plausible (to me) that technological development has always been a fulcrum for accumulation of wealth and power, and that our current moment is better explained as a shift in whose wealth and power is benefited (kings and emperors replaced by multinational corps and capital owners), rather than a complete reorientation of the nature of technology itself.